Postmates added a high-profile executive from Google to its board of directors. Kristin Reinke, vice president of finance at Google, joins as an independent director and is now part of a leadership group including Postmates’ founders and long-term investors. “As Postmates continues to innovate and shape the on-demand delivery category, Kristin brings a wide range of financial expertise and experience to our board of directors,” said Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann, noting that her background also includes time at Oracle. A member of Google’s finance leadership team since 2005, Reinke helped […]
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McDonald’s is opening up its delivery relationship, announcing via a press release that it signed a contract to make DoorDash its second third-party delivery provider, effectively ending its exclusive deal with Uber Eats that was viewed by many industry watchers as a sign of the times. The world’s largest restaurant brand by revenue will still deliver via Uber Eats, but it’s no longer pretending they’re married. According to Team Ronald, the first DoorDash deliveries will begin with more than 200 restaurants in the Houston market on July 29. “In a […]
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When a restaurant operator has thousands of locations across all 50 states, a national delivery contract makes a lot of sense to get the best deal from third-party delivery networks. Which is why Kahala, the parent company of everything from Blimpie, Baja Express, BUILT Custom Burgers to Cereality, Pinkberry and Cold Stone Creamery (among others) is working through the major delivery chains. But it all started organically, as franchisees across the many brands under the Kahala umbrella started signing their own delivery contracts. “We’d have franchisees reaching out and asking […]
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A new consumer spending survey from KeyBanc Capital Markets suggests consumers are looking to increase the amount of money they spend on food-delivery services in the future, which bodes well for continued growth in the category going forward. Asked to predict their future spending with Seamless, Postmates, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, as well as the Domino’s, Pizza Hut and Papa John’s pizza apps, the majority of respondents in all categories indicated they would be spending moderately or significantly more on the listed restaurant platforms. Those numbers were highest for Seamless, […]
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It may never make sense to have a single, small cup of coffee delivered on its own, but The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf’s new exclusive delivery deal with Postmates has major potential for an international chain with approximately 1,200 stores across the globe. With an in-house assumption that delivery begins to make sense at the $10-an-order mark, the brand is starting its delivery program in and around its Southern California home turf. As part of an overarching strategy to “drive accessibility and convenience” the brand is deploying a flexible […]
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A Texas-based grocery retailer is launching a pilot program to test self-driving, autonomous grocery deliveries in San Antonio. The retailer, H-E-B, is taking baby steps to get started, using a single driverless van developed by Udelv, a California-based company that develops autonomous delivery vehicles, which it calls ADVs. Once the driverless van gets rolling, it will have multiple climate-controlled compartments allowing it to ferry multiple orders at a time, including those with fresh, frozen and dry goods. With more than 116,000 employees, H-E-B is the largest privately held employer in […]
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There’s a running conversation in the restaurant industry about delivery’s impact on margins, and now investment advisor Hedgeye Risk Management has crunched the numbers in a range of scenarios, including how much delivery impacts the total volume, as well as incrementality and various commission rates. Hedgeye’s first scenario assumes that delivery is 5 percent of a hypothetical restaurant’s average unit volume, $75,000 in sales for total annual sales of $1.5 million. Assuming a 30 percent fee for delivery, that’s a $22,500 hit to the bottom line, for a total restaurant […]
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When a big brand jumps into delivery, there’s a big decision to make: Do you open the brand to every delivery provider possible to meet the delivery consumer everywhere or forge a deeper partnership with a single partner? For Dunkin’ Brands, the answer was a close partnership with Grubhub to push their delivery efforts further. The reason was all about efficiency and deep integration so that delivery orders were seamless for customers and staff in the brand’s 7,500+ locations across the U.S. “We decided to get into a deep relationship […]
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As the VP of off-premise sales at Newk’s Eatery, Courtney Smith and her team are tasked with helping the 127-unit restaurant brand grow delivery and catering sales, while also helping franchisees make sense of a quickly morphing industry. Their work entails negotiating with third-party delivery providers over fees and data, sussing out the cause of the occasional negative guest complaint Yelp review and making sure delivery providers literally answer the call when the company or one of its franchisees have concerns. Having done this with other restaurant groups, including La […]
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Incrementality, margins, cannibalization and the true impact of third-party delivery on a restaurant business can become to be tricky math really fast. And that math is essential to move from testing the waters of third-party delivery to learning to swim. So to get a deeper look at the impact of third-party delivery, Sense360 unveiled Delivery IQ, a product dedicated to matching operating results with broader industry data. CEO and co-founder Eli Portnoy said it was designed to offer clearer insight than looking at the profit and loss statement alone. “Leveraged […]
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