Only 15 to 18 percent of restaurants today offer delivery, declared Alex Canter at the Food On Demand Conference, “which is a huge mismatch compared to 80 percent who are getting delivery. So if you’re not listed on any one of these platforms you don’t exist.” Canter, along with Elizabeth Tomlinson, served as “millennial operators” on the panel, as moderator Fred LeFranc, Results Thru Strategy, noted their youth and the audience delighted in their fresh insights. Canter has personal experience dragging a brick-and-mortar restaurant into the online ordering world. He […]
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Adam DeWitt, Grubhub’s president and chief financial officer, was recruited to the Chicago-based delivery player in part because he previously was CFO of a publicly held firm so knew the drill. In 2011 Grubhub had $20 million in revenue and in 2018 topped a billion—“so quite a ride,” as DeWitt puts it mildly. Despite Wall Street’s criticism after its most recent quarterly conference call, which is inevitable when a public company says it will slow down geographic expansion even a bit, DeWitt says being public is worth it, and even […]
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Chef Ivan Orkin, known as Ivan Ramen and the keynote speaker at the Food On Demand Conference April 1-2, recalls many times and people that fed his “obsession with hospitality.” Chief among them was one of his first jobs at a very famous restaurant, a four-star New York Times establishment where “the chef was a sight to see. He wore a starched white chef jacket … and he had incredible posture. He would whisk through the dining room touching tables,” Orkin said. “I learned a lot about cooking but the […]
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Paul Damico joined Naf Naf Grill as CEO in 2017, only to find the Middle Eastern cuisine brand owned by Roark Capital wasn’t on the online map. “It was like the 1990s. We didn’t have a delivery platform, we didn’t have an app,” he told the audience at the Food On Demand Conference. But he decided the situation was actually a plus. “It was kind of refreshing. We took a step back and said, let’s take this time and build a really thoughtful strategy,” he said. He had seen plenty […]
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“To the victor goes the wallet,” read the headline on exclusive research prepared by SeeLevel HX and presented by Food On Demand at the conference April 1, and the victors in the food delivery business are clear—so far. According to respondents in Minneapolis and Moline where the study took place, DoorDash had 58 percent of the market; Grubhub, 50 percent; UberEats, 39 percent; Postmates, 21 percent; Amazon Restaurants, 13 percent. Bite Squad had 3 percent, but with its recent acquisition by Waitr, National Sales Director Scott Leffel, who helped to […]
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In case anyone was overwhelmed or even jaded by the shiny, giant delivery players speaking on stage at the Food On Demand Conference today—Grubhub, UberEats, Postmates, Google and their impressive peers—along came Delivery Dudes’ founder Jayson Koss, speaking truth to power in funny fashion and rocking the best hair of the conference. He founded Delivery Dudes in 2009 and is now in 60 to 70 cities. “Our drivers are happy, we’ve never had a drivers strike to this day,” he said, with a little jab at Uber. “When I started the company, restaurants […]
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“We have to think about a system of 4,000 stores and how are you going to create a consistent experience,” says Dawn Croft of KFC.
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Since Seth Priebatsch, founder of LevelUp, joined Grubhub after his company’s acquisition, he’s been bombarded by requests from restaurant operators to give a discount. What he’s heard most often: “Sharpen your pencil,” he said during the second day of the Food On Demand Conference, but he joked there’s a problem with that phrase. “I’m a millennial so I’ve never even used a pencil!”
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When famed ramen chef Ivan Orkin opened a tiny ramen shop in a suburb of Tokyo in 2007, he’d look out his shop window and see an old lady who ran a tobacco store. “This old lady and I became fast friends,” he recalled to the opening day audience at the Food On Demand Conference in Chicago, and ultimately taught him a lesson in hospitality and delivery that he shared with the crowd. “She would cock her head a little bit and I knew that meant she wanted delivery,” so […]
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Owning the customer is critical for restaurant operators as the delivery and mobile ordering business evolves, said Andrew Charles, senior analyst for Cowen & Company, in opening remarks at the Food On Demand Conference in Chicago today. “The best thing that restaurant operators can do is they need to own that customer and the customer experience,” he said. In May of 2017, he said, 52 percent of customers Cowen surveyed said they placed their orders through the restaurant’s app or websites; now it’s down to 30 percent as third-party platforms […]
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