Looking at which online grocery delivery brands offer the freshest food the fastest and most cost-effectively, Consumer Reports just published a ranking that listed Target-owned Shipt as the best groceries-on-demand service. Consumer Reports is a subscription-based publication that surveyed more than 3,000 of its members for the report. They collectively rated Shipt highest for hours of delivery, timeliness, communications on delivery status, packaging and text-based customer service—among more conventional factors like quality and freshness of the items delivered. The report also includes a stat from Bain and company and Google […]
Google has added an “Order Delivery” button allowing customers to summon meals from their favorite restaurants, which can be delivered through Postmates, DoorDash, Delivery.com, Slice and ChowNow. The company says more delivery providers will be added soon. By reducing a tiny amount of friction for hangry consumers, integration of delivery into Google’s search, maps and voice assistants could bring a new wave of later-adopters into the food-on-demand ecosystem. Being able to order your favorite meal by saying “OK, Google…” is novel, but the “Order Delivery” button on its search and […]
The conveyor belt may be the neatest thing at Kitchen United’s first Illinois ghost kitchen within the River North neighborhood in Chicago. Restaurant operators place their packaged orders and they’re whisked away overhead to get to the waiting delivery drivers, and then off to hungry diners. Jesse Koontz, the franchisee for Dog Haus in Chicago who started a delivery-only operation two weeks ago at the new Kitchen United facility, showed off that feature in a tour last week, but he also listed a couple of other nice aspects of the […]
In a pre-holiday announcement, DoorDash announced another round of investor cash bringing its total haul to more than $2 billion and the company’s valuation to an incredible $12.6 billion. The San Francisco-based company, founded by CEO Tony Xu, announced the completion of a Series G round of $600 million. This latest round was lead by new investors Darsana Capital Partners of New York and also brought in Sands Capital as another new investor. The round also included DST Global, Temasek, Dragoneer, Sequoia, all of which participated in the $400 million […]
As Wells Fargo sees restaurant delivery swelling to a $50 billion industry in the U.S. by 2022, the mega bank’s recent survey of 475 delivery consumers provides some insight on frequency, incrementality and the types of restaurants that have the most to gain. In its survey of nearly 500 consumers who ordered restaurant delivery at least one time over the surveyed month, the most notable finding was that the bulk of its respondents ordered delivery less than five times in a month, and 28 percent ordered delivery only one time […]
It’s been clear that Amazon has its hungry eyes on the meal-delivery space, but it’s now making its big move with word that Seattle’s deliver-everything giant led a $575 million financing round in London-based Deliveroo, one of Europe’s largest third-party delivery platforms. Originally founded in 2013 and now operating in more than 200 cities across Europe, as well as portions of the Middle East and Asia, Deliveroo posted revenues of $354 million USD in 2017. Reacting to the news, some industry watchers have suggested this investment is a bad sign […]
Ford Motor Company is partnering with a robot manufacturer to pair its self-driving cars with advanced, humanlike robots to bring packages right to the front door of anxiously waiting customers. Its new partnership with Agility Robotics is focused on new ways of making deliveries, specifically tackling that difficult last step of bringing goods from the driverless car to your door. “A ride-hailing trip could double as a delivery service, dropping off packages in between transporting passengers,” Washington said. “And as we’ve learned in our pilot programs, it’s not always convenient […]
If you’re Uber, Grubhub or DoorDash directing a huge fleet of delivery drivers or a restaurant with a lean-and-mean in-house delivery team, you have a vested interest in making sure your drivers are as safe as possible. Whether it’s causing an accident or just being a jerk on the roads, a bad driver can jeopardize a brand’s goodwill or endanger the lives of customers. With a goal of preventing accidents in delivery cars without built-in collision avoidance technology, the free Driver app from Driver Technologies’ uses everyday smartphones to allow […]
Summing up its recent restaurant technology symposium that included 15 restaurant technology companies and investors, Piper Jaffray Senior Research Analysts Nicole Miller Regan and Joshua Long looked at accelerating changes in the $1.6 trillion U.S. food market that’s now split 50/50 between restaurants and grocery stores. The topline stat is $200 billion, as this is only the latest study projecting such a market opportunity for delivery in the coming years. That would represent 25 cents of every dollar in the restaurant industry. Diving deeper, the report focused on a few […]
Last week, research firm AlixPartners put out an interesting look on where the delivery world goes next, and one key part of the next delivery phase looks like it may be coming fast. According to that survey, the U.S. delivery market is in the middle of “Wave 2,” where consumers want their deliveries fast, cheap and routine. The next phase of where the U.S. and other economies is heading is all about convenience and getting cumbersome, bulky items delivered. This evolution also goes beyond simple deliveries with the desire for […]
