By Nick Upton
We’ve all been there. You order delivery or carryout and eagerly open the bag to find not the beautiful restaurant presentation, but a soggy mess. If you’re on the receiving end, you don’t want a soggy mess, but even more important no restaurant worth its salt wants to deliver a soggy mess. Presentation matters and with the multitude of delivery options today, consumers are less willing to trade it for convenience.
By Nancy Weingartner
Jenna Tanenbaum, 28, and Amir Cohen, 32, launched their smoothie delivery business, GreenBlender, with a $500 ad budget slated for Google ad words and a website. It was a lean start, Tanenbaum admits, and just two-and-a-half years ago, they were the ones riding the subway delivering boxes of fresh produce to customers in Brooklyn. Their mantra was “test quickly, fail fast and see what people want before you invest a lot of money,” Tanenbaum said. Those early customers were their beta group.
You would have thought the restaurant analysts were reading lines from the movie Twister, specifically the part where Dusty tells Bill the monster storm is headed right for them. Alas, experts from The Boston Consulting Group were telling a room full of restaurant operators that third-party delivery is going to be “the biggest-single disruptor in the restaurant industry that we’ve seen in the last several decades.” This is serious, they emphasized.
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By Laura Michaels
With the rise of the off-premise catering market that earned $52.3 billion in 2015—a 20 percent sales increase from 2012—restaurant operators are in a position to capitalize on the shift to order more meals from restaurants for everything from parties to office meetings.
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Call me crazy, but I love wandering the grocery store on early weekend mornings. While most normal people are still dozing in their beds, I’m smiling behind my cart at an hour when the muzak seems extra charming, fake birds chirping in the produce department are authentically relaxing, the employees are still chipper and I cruise around unfettered while envisioning a week’s worth of home cooking. So why have I officially ditched the habit, cut the in-store cord and signed up for at-home grocery delivery? Call it a self-diagnosed case […]
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Grubhub is facing a surge of backlash on social media after CEO Matt Maloney issued a statement criticizing President-elect Donald Trump’s divisive campaign rhetoric. In a statement issued Thursday, Maloney wrote the following: While demeaning, insulting and ridiculing minorities, immigrants and the physically/mentally disabled worked for Mr. Trump, I want to be clear that this behavior – and these views, have no place at Grubhub. Had he worked here, many of his comments would have resulted in his immediate termination. His statement went on to say the company has cultivated a “culture of support and […]
Read MoreThe editors of Franchise Times Corp, (publisher of Franchise Times, the Restaurant Finance Monitor and Foodservice News) are launching a start-up media project to provide insights, news and information to all those innovative businesses that are “profiting at the intersection of food, mobility and technology.”
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Could these canoes be Domino’s new delivery fleet?
Raising money
Food delivery start-up Postmates raised $141 million in a financing round led by Founders Fund, a San Francisco VC firm already an investor. Shares were sold at the same price as last year’s round, Bloomberg Technology stated. The additional cash gives the company a valuation of about $600 million, the online story said. Postmates, which currently operates in 44 markets, plans to expand internationally in 2017.
Look out brick and mortar: Executives at two of the industry’s biggest brands—Postmates and DoorDash—suggest the pace of new product offerings, internal tech upgrades, big-brand partnerships and industry consolidation is still accelerating as more consumers and investors adopt the idea that anything can be delivered right to their doors.
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At one time “food on demand” and “baby” in the same sentence referred to whether to feed your newborn on a schedule or when he or she demanded it. Now it’s a whole new industry, as local and national start-ups are cranking out organic, farm-to-baby-spoon subscription services for busy, health-conscious parents.
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