Grubhub announced Grubhub+, a new membership program to expand its rewards program and keep customers locked into the system. Founder and CEO Matt Maloney said it expands the company’s robust reward programs even further, a key strategy the executive team emphasized during its latest earnings call. “Generous diner rewards are at the core of Grubhub’s competitive strategy. As the only profitable company in our space, we are leveraging our profits to stay laser-focused on having the most restaurants in the network and giving away as much free food as possible,” […]
Your Fare, one of the handful of service companies helping restaurant operators make sense of digital delivery, announced a successful venture funding round of $2.4 million. Founder and CEO Chris Monk said the company, which started as a basic accounting tool for online delivery services, has evolved into a more robust offering, including a singular tablet for restaurants, point-of-sale integration and menu management. He said a key thing for clients lately has been offloading delivery-service support issues to Your Fare staff. “Really, where we’ve seen the tablet go is providing […]
As pizza delivery giant Domino’s delivers faster and faster, it continues to invest heavily in carryout. According to CEO Ritch Allison, nearly half of the brand’s customers now come to Domino’s locations to pick up their orders. “Our carryout business in the U.S. is now approaching 45 percent of our total orders, helping us to diversify our business into this carryout segment, which, as we discussed in the past, is significantly larger than the delivery segment today,” said Allison, referring to the total addressable off-premises market. It’s been a big […]
Seeing the unstoppable rise of delivery and catering, a New York City-based entrepreneur with a background in farming, engineering and philosophy is turning his attention to helping restaurants streamline their third-party delivery programs and avoid worst-practices that don’t help restaurants build loyalty, traffic or profits. Called Figure Eight Logistics, the company’s co-founder Scott Landers and his team work directly with restaurant operators to help them capitalize on direct-to-consumer convenience without eroding share or profits. In addition to in-restaurant consultation, Figure Eight also launched a new website and newsletter to share […]
The once-disruptive meal kit leader, Blue Apron, announced that it was looking at a “range of strategic alternatives” as it reported its final quarterly earnings for 2019. In all, the fourth-quarter results were not great. The company missed earnings per share estimates by 6-cents, losing $1.66 per share. Revenue also sank to unexpected levels with the company missing expectations by $3.4 million for the fourth quarter. Revenues for the quarter slowed by 33 percent year-over-year to $94.3 million and full year revenue sank 32 percent to $454.9 million. As a […]
After recently closing its last full-service restaurant in Chicago, P.F. Chang’s has opened a new, smaller concept that’s exclusively focused on carryout, delivery and catering in the city’s River North neighborhood on the edge of the central business district. To juice consumer interest, the first 100 guests got free lettuce wraps for a year. At just more than 2,000 square feet, the River North location has a smaller footprint than the brand’s full-scale restaurants. The company said the to-go concepts will create access to the brand “in areas such as […]
After years of lackluster growth compared to the fast rise of meal delivery, U.S. consumers are starting to embrace online grocery shopping, with a new study arguing that groceries ordered in advance for delivery and pickup has passed a tipping point and “is now an undisputed inevitability.” Fabric, a New York-based micro-fulfillment brand focused on the grocery market—formerly called CommonSense Robotics—released an in-depth survey last month showing online grocery penetration tracking ahead of previous industry projections and on a path to more than double in the next five years. “By […]
In a damaging salvo in the legislative war in California, a judge opted not to block the labor law commonly known as Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5). The labor law went into effect in the state on January 1, 2020, and puts a three-part test in effect to determine whether or not a gig-economy worker or freelancer rises to the level of employee. Under the rule, scores of delivery drivers, rideshare drivers and other non-traditional workers are deemed employees and entitled to broader labor protections. Read more about the law […]
It might not seem like a lot amid the billions invested in the grander food-on-demand space, but $545,900,000 in cumulative investment for essentially blank kitchen spaces is incredible and shows that investors are as hungry as ever to get a piece of the evolving foodservice landscape. This vast sum also doesn’t include the incredible amount of money delivery providers are putting toward their own ghost facilities. Deliveroo, for one, plans more than 2,000 such facilities across Europe. The Amazon-led $575 million Series G round will help pay for those kitchens, […]
As the e-scooter craze begins to subside 20 years after Segways first promised to change our world, electric bicycles built to haul cargo might actually deliver on this lofty claim. Battery-powered two-wheelers will soon be ferrying groceries and Amazon boxes throughout dense, urban environments, a former Deliveroo exec who founded the Bolt e-bike company, Mina Nada, says the biggest opportunity is in delivering prepared meals. The keys to Bolt’s future impact lies in the details of the business model, which was designed to avoid the pitfalls, regulatory hurdles and economic […]
