When DoorDash first announced its Project DASH charity effort that was borne out of a company hackathon last year, it was a nice goodwill moment for the industry. But it had the sheen of one of those tech-giant features that make for some nice PR and a tax write-off but wouldn’t actually do much. Cynical editors be damned, though, as Project DASH (which stands for DoorDash Acts for Sustainability and Hunger) has become a monumental goodwill effort that put some real substance behind a nice idea. So far, Project DASH […]
With a background in the early-stage, restaurant-delivery scene, as well as raw memories of his parents losing everything after a career in restaurant ownership, Zuul Kitchens Co-founder and CEO Corey Manicone says ghost kitchens are the logical way forward for an industry that was never designed for the intense demands of delivery and off-premises dining in general. His company’s first ghost kitchen recently opened in Manhattan and, with industry darling Sweetgreen as one of its first tenants and massive investments flowing into some of his best-known competitors, Manicone sees this […]
If you’ve ever thought Rachel Ray’s 30-minute meals or simple family-pleasing meals would be better if someone else made them, you’re in luck. Under a new partnership between Rachel Ray and Uber Eats, 10 cities will get their own Rachel Ray delivery-only kitchen for 10 weeks starting around the October 15 launch of her new book: Rachel Ray 50. Uber Eats will be the exclusive delivery provider for the virtual kitchens for 10 weeks, delivering prepared menu items from her book. It’s an interesting evolution for the idea of a […]
The delivery world is rife with partnerships these days as the landscape continues to evolve. A new partnership between Olo and Google shows that the growing delivery industry is shaping how some of the world’s most impactful companies do business, while making it even more frictionless to order delivery meals. With the new partnership, digital order aggregator Olo and Google are linking their technology to provide a nearly seamless way to order from Olo’s 300 restaurant brands and 70,000 locations straight from Google’s pages. The tie-up seems like a major […]
New data from the National Restaurant Association (NRA) examining consumer spending and desires for dining in restaurants and ordering delivery shows that baby boomers are more likely than other age group to boost their off-premises spending in the future. According to the NRA’s numbers gleaned from a telephone survey of more than 1,000 adults conducted in September, consumer spending in restaurants has “trended generally higher” in 2019, excluding August numbers that showed a one-month decline. Overall, 49 percent of adults want to order both takeout and delivery more frequently going […]
DoorDash is alerting customers about a massive data breach that occurred back in May. In all, the data of 4.9 million customers, drivers and merchants was exposed in the breach. There was a lot of information released, but aside driver’s license numbers for drivers; much of it was relatively low risk information. DoorDash listed the breached data in a blog post. • Profile information including names, email addresses, delivery addresses, order history, phone numbers, as well as hashed, salted passwords — a form of rendering the actual password indecipherable to […]
Bon Appetit, the award-winning, food-focused magazine brand, is turning a new page by partnering with Grubhub on online delivery. Bon Appetit, Delivered is a virtual, delivery-only restaurant where customers order food online to be delivered. Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises (LEYE) is the group behind the proverbial digital curtain that will operate this virtual kitchen. LEYE has plenty of experience managing restaurants, as the Chicago-based brand operates more than 130 restaurants in multiple states. Meals will come fully prepared from a menu designed by Bon Appetit’s Test Kitchen editors and produced […]
Zume, a California-based brand focused on creating a more sustainable food system, is partnering with &pizza, a popular East Coast pizza chain, to use its Forward Mobile Kitchens to expand the restaurant brand into new markets and test products before adding them to its brick-and-mortar menus. The goal, according to both companies, is providing a “seamless brand experience” across all of its different restaurant formats, which include commissary kitchens and food trucks. Zume’s leasable mobile kitchens are like food trucks focused exclusively on delivery. Meals are cooked on site, and […]
New data shines a light on delivery consumers and their habits. Numerator, a market research and consumer insights company, took a look at some 450,000 American consumers to glean some information about their collective appetite for delivery. The big numbers: The average food-delivery user places an order a little over seven times a year and spends about $22 per order. For some context, McDonald’s dine-in and delivery customers order about once a month or 12 times a year and have an average ticket price of around $5. An interesting statistic […]
The cash is still gushing into the delivery ecosystem, with Kitchen United recently announcing another $40 million infusion to the Google-backed national ghost kitchen operator. Its Series B funding round was co-led by RXR Realty, one of New York City’s largest real estate owners, investors and developers. With the new affiliation with RXR, Kitchen United will enter the New York City market, with ghost kitchens opening in RXR and other properties in the greater tri-state area. The company will continue to seek out new locations in its primary growth markets, […]
