Trade wars are hot topics these days, and the latest to pop up is pitting Little Caesars against its much larger national pizza competitors. Once a delivery skeptic, Little Caesars is getting into direct-to-consumer delivery through an exclusive partnership with DoorDash Drive, which the Detroit-based pizza player claims will result in pizzas that are “at least $5 less” than similar orders from Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Papa John’s. With a reputation for affordable pizzas that are hot and ready for customer pickup, Little Caesars says its delivered pies will come […]
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One of the biggest topics of discussion during the massive Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas was the future of smart cities and all the innovative thinking and hard work between the cities of today and a truly smart city. “We’re on the cusp of dramatic disruption,” said Brian Collie, a managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group. “Franky, we have no choice but to get this right. Cities today are already overcrowded and facing many challenges, and as they grow over the next decades, those problems […]
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The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is absolute nerdy chaos. Some 180,000 or more attendees are there to see hundreds or thousands of exhibitors all promising the next big thing in technology. Ultimately, the world may never see what the breathless bloggers hail as the disruption to alter civilization as we know it, but there were still some pretty novel concepts for foodservice broadly. Picnic’s Pizza Assembly Bot First, of course, the pizza robot! Built by the automation company Picnic, its new bot is a bit of a misnomer. It’s more […]
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A facial recognition company is starting with the restaurant industry in its quest to break consumers free of the tyranny of pulling out purses, wallets or phones to pay for things. For hungry consumers, the claimed benefits are speedier transactions and instant access to loyalty accounts, while restaurants and retailers are being sold on faster kiosk throughput and lower credit card processing fees. A subsidiary of tech-focused restaurant brand Cali Group, which is also an investor in Kitchen United, PopID is looking to replicate what’s happened with the fast adoption […]
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As it works through a new restaurant design, Chipotle is testing new walk-up and drive-thru windows for digital orders and pickups. According to a CNBC article, the burrito giant will open around 80 restaurants with “Chipotlanes,” which is what they’re calling their drive-thru pickup lanes. It’s adding pick-up windows to new locations as well, but it’s not clear how many locations will include such windows. Many legacy locations already have pick-up windows, intended initially for take-out orders, but the company shuttered numerous ones around the time traffic plummeted during a […]
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There’s no shortage of innovative autonomous-vehicle companies out there, from Starship rolling around the sidewalks of college campuses and Washington, D.C., to Nuro delivering groceries in on-the-road vehicles. But REV, developed by Refraction AI, fits right between those models, figuratively and literally. The five-foot tall, four-foot long vehicles are designed to drive at top speeds of 15 miles per hour and operate for 12 hours on a single charge. It’s a lot like other autonomous operations, as the vehicle arrives and alerts a restaurant, the staff punches in a code […]
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MyValue365.com, a Chicago-based ethnic grocery ordering and delivery company that’s previously focused on at-home consumers, announced its entry into B2B grocery-delivery business, which includes deliveries to restaurants. This offering is a part of the company’s new wholesale business arm catering to increased requests from restaurants to get higher quality groceries delivered directly to their place of business. “All the restaurants that have reached out to us typically order groceries from four to five different suppliers on a weekly, and sometimes even daily, basis, said the company founders in a press […]
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In an exclusive interview with Food On Demand, Waitr CEO Adam Price dished it out on competing with billion-dollar players, whether the “big four” delivery brands will survive, and how a fast pivot to data-based decisions is attempting to transform the fifth-largest U.S. delivery brand from choppy waters to an industry leader—with an obsessive eye on the budget. A New Yorker who got started in the space helping big-city restaurants replace in-house delivery, Price moved to Waitr’s home of Lafayette, Louisiana, last February when he joined the company as chief […]
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In all the excitement of delivery and off-premises growth broadly, the decision of whether to go out or stay in remains a key consideration. Obviously, consumers demand convenience when they want it, but according to a new survey, they still prefer a great restaurant experience. In the survey by Vixxo, a facility-management company in the restaurant and retail space, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they still prefer restaurant dining over takeout or delivery. In the survey of 1,000 people, a total of 62 percent said they would prefer to eat […]
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With driverless grocery deliveries ramping up during the first quarter of 2020, Walmart is beginning a new autonomous delivery pilot in Houston with Nuro, the latest of several big-name partnerships for the California-based autonomous vehicle manufacturer. In an interview with Automotive News, David Estrada of Nuro said the company chose Houston due to the diversity, quality and busyness of the city’s road network. “It’s a great place to develop the technology,” he said, “and then we want to show we can make this an efficient service that can work for […]
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