Fresh off the announcement of its deal to deliver for YUM Brands’ Taco Bell and KFC, Stan Chia, COO of Grubhub, told the audience at the FOD Conference, that the restaurant industry is mirroring the rise of e-commerce for retail, and for the first time ever people are spending more at restaurants than on groceries. “It’s a fun place to be,” he said about Grubhub’s market share. “Our goal is to connect restaurants and consumers.” Because YUM’s Pizza Hut is already a leader in pizza delivery, they won’t be doing […]
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Amazon’s Russell Baker gave conference attendees advice on how to be customer obsessed like the large, but nimble, company he works for as general manager of Amazon restaurants. “Obsession is all in, it preoccupies or intrudes on your mind,” he said. “Customers always want more, so this forces you to invent things they don’t even know they need yet. So pay attention to details.” For instance, “We noticed people are reordering the same thing from the same restaurant, so we put that at top (of the page), and programmed it […]
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When Denny’s management decided to “age-down the brand,” off-premise dining was one avenue, however, “we knew we had a challenge with packaging,” Dave Coltrin, VP Guest Experience & Marketing Tech. at Denny’s said.
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Food delivery is “not some cute fad” as some restaurant CEOs would suggest. “This is a fundamental shift,” declared Noah Glass, founder and CEO of Olo, speaking at the first Food On Demand Conference in Dallas today. Olo, as many of its 95 million users know, provides digital ordering and on-demand interfaces for the restaurant industry, so he may be said to have a vested interest in his predictions. But he painted a detailed and convincing case in a keynote address at the conference, the first of its kind and […]
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“It’s the very earliest innings of on-demand food delivery,” says Christopher Payne, COO of DoorDash, the third-party restaurant delivery service that is now in 60 markets and 600 cities and is about to blow up to three times that, he said during an on-stage interview at the debut Food on Demand Conference in Dallas today. “Door Dash is a 4 ½-year-old company, so we have a long way to go,” Payne said in response to questions from Food On Demand’s Deputy Editor Tom Kaiser. Many of the restaurant brands they […]
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I love cities, but have concerns about how the latest crop of high-tech upgrades will impact city life at the street and sidewalk level. Thanks to advancements like delivery robots, autonomous taxis and drones, which will eventually hit the urban scene in a big way, the one certainty is that cities of the future will look, feel and operate much different than they do today. With Lyfts on demand, tweeting food trucks and restaurants offering discounts when you’re within a given distance, we’re all guinea pigs as businesses figure out […]
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In its first step to transitioning the company’s existing hybrid-electric fleet to fully electric vehicles in the coming years, Bite Squad will test the Tesla Model 3 as part of its food delivery vehicle fleet. The initial test will be in Bite Squad’s home market of Minneapolis; the restaurant delivery service operates in more than 30 markets across the country. “On an average day, we have delivery drivers navigating thousands of food deliveries through the streets of 30 metropolitan markets across the country,” said Bite Squad co-founder and CEO Kian […]
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Meal kits is a tough business, just look at the recent news around Blue Apron, the stock is tanking and one stock watcher says there’s “no surviving” the crowded market which now counts Walmart and Weight Watchers as new entrants. That may be overblown, especially in this red-hot consolidation cycle, but there’s no denying that meal kits are walled in by some tricky competition and more than 100 years of consumer grocery-shopping habits. To build out its niche and avoid looking like Blue Apron—and hopefully avoiding its same fate—Snap Kitchen […]
Read MoreBulkbox Aims for Affordable Bulk Food Delivery Seeking to make organic, healthy foods accessible and affordable to more households, Bulkbox Foods launched this month, working directly with farmers to provide organic produce and grass-fed meats straight to the consumer. To offer what it says in the most cost-effective price, Bulkbox Foods doesn’t further process any of its products and is not a meal kit service. The Los Angeles-based company, co-founded by Bridgette and Tyson Blackney, also uses 100% recyclable packaging. Bulkbox customers choose one 3.5-5.5 pound whole piece of meat […]
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Amazon is going low-tech and a bit retro with its Treasure Truck, the online retailers’ version of deals on wheels, that is now coming to a Whole Foods parking lot near you. The first Treasure Truck deal was the hot-selling Instant Pot, according to the Tech Crunch website.
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