Many restaurant owners get into the delivery game with the goal of expanding their brand’s reach, citing increased exposure to customers over expectations of greatly increasing revenue. They justify possible concerns over quality control and menu confusion with the expectation that more people will know their name and order their food. But what if those customers think of the delivery service first, not the restaurant? Where does the brand loyalty lie?
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By Nancy Weingartner
At one time we were all content to just have “everybody know our name” at hospitality locales, now we want them to remember our face. UFood Grill, a fast-casual healthy restaurant chain where every menu item is under 700 calories, is introducing facial-recognition software to help speed up the ordering process at its kiosks.
By Tom Kaiser
Low margins, enormous overhead, perishable inventory, cutthroat competition and crabby customers are just a few reasons the grocery business isn’t easy. But that’s not deterring Amazon’s most recent example of relentless expansion in its hometown of Seattle.
By Nick Upton
Caviar’s late 2016 acquisition of Philadelphia food-delivery startup Main Line Delivery put an end cap on the M&A activities in the food-on-demand realm. And deals like it could make 2017 a banner year for M&A in the space.
By Nancy Weingartner
When it comes to food on demand, the U.S. is behind the developing world, but with the plethora of new companies jumping on the bandwagon, we’re doing our best to catch up.
By Nancy Weingartner Want to get more productivity out of your employees? Then let them eat cake — or sliced Fuji apples or drink Red Bull. Just don’t make them leave the workplace on company hours to forage for themselves. “The idea behind it,” says Snackdash CEO Calvin Gaisford, “is we want to keep employees here (at their work stations).” To that end, Snackdash delivers break room supplies and puts them away, so the receptionist or the buff, and handsomely paid, programmer isn’t schlepping heavy boxes to help out. There […]
Read MoreFood On Demand News Briefs for January 2017
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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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