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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Data Insights

Forget IPOs. DoorDash Is the One to Watch Right Now in Third-Party Delivery

Grubhub still leads the third-party food delivery market in terms of sales, and of late, Postmates and Uber Eats have gotten a lot of attention for their respective pre- and post-IPO news. But DoorDash may well be the most important company to watch in the escalating showdown for third-party delivery dominance, according to new data from tech company Second Measure.

Second Measure analyzes anonymized credit card transactions and uses that data to shed light on customer behaviors. In the world of third-party delivery, those behaviors underscore the rapid growth DoorDash has undergone recently, growth that has the company almost on equal footing with Grubhub in terms of monthly sales. Grubhub leads the market, with 32 percent of total monthly sales. But the company’s growth is now slower than its competitors, as evidenced in the following graph:

Source: Second Measure

DoorDash, meanwhile, holds 30 percent of the market in terms of monthly sales, and unlike Grubhub, it’s still growing rapidly. In February 2019, DoorDash closed a $400,000 million round and had a valuation of $7.1 billion. Besides investors, Second Measure notes in its report that DoorDash saw “a staggering 216-percent year-over-year jump [in sales], compared to 58 percent at Uber Eats and 4 percent at Grubhub.”

Part of those rising sales numbers are no doubt due to DoorDash’s aggressive push across the country. The service is the only third-party delivery service right now to be in all 50 U.S. states, in case you couldn’t tell from the endless numbers of promotions and partnerships the company does with everyone from Canter’s Deli in LA to Taco Bell to the Wyndham Hotels chain. The service is also now in 50 Canadian cities.

Impressive as the numbers are, no one’s place in the third-party delivery market seems certain because the space changes so rapidly — something that will continue for the rest of 2019 and beyond. DoorDash will have to work hard at retaining its customers if it wants to keep up. And as Second Measure and others have noted, loyalty to any one service isn’t something third-party delivery customers prioritize. For example, in the first quarter of 2017, 88 percent of Grubhub’s customers didn’t use another service; two years later, that number has dropped to 62 percent.

Unless, that is, you’re in the south. It seems of all the third-party delivery services out there, Waitr, who’s business is more focused on second-tier U.S. cities, has the highest number of loyal customers on the list. Waitr (who recently acquired Bite Squad) doesn’t (yet) have the reach or growth rate of DoorDash, but focusing on customer loyalty in cities that aren’t New York, LA, or other major metropolises could eventually be hugely advantageous. DoorDash should take note.

Study: More US Consumers Buying Groceries Online, Amazon Still Top Place People Buy Them

Coresight Research released its “US Online Grocery Survey 2019” this week, finding that 36.8 percent of U.S. consumers bought groceries online over the past year, representing a jump from 23.1 percent in the firm’s 2018 survey. Year over year, Coresight says this is an increase of roughly 35 million more consumers buying groceries online.

However, that doesn’t mean every aspect of the online grocery biz is rosy. Coresight found that while more people may be buying groceries online, the vast majority aren’t buying much. According to the survey, “72.4 percent buy only a small proportion of their groceries online while 11.8% buy a lot of their groceries online.”

When consumers are buying groceries online, Amazon.com is the top place to do it. Coresight says 62.5 percent of who bought groceries online did so through Amazon, which commands a double digit lead over competitors like Walmart and Target (see below). It should be noted, however, that most of this shopping is through Amazon proper, not Amazon Fresh or Prime Now, and that Amazon shoppers generally spend less on groceries there then at Walmart.com, Target.com or Kroger.com, making Amazon shoppers “occasional or small-basket online shoppers.”

While Amazon may be in the lead when it comes to the number of online grocery shoppers, Walmart and Target are both making gains. Coresight’s study found the portion of people buying groceries online who bought from Walmart was 37.4 percent, up from 25.5 percent in 2018, same goes for Target.com, which nabbed 15.7 percent of online grocery shoppers, up from 6.9 percent in 2018.

News of this growth comes at a time when retailers are investing heavily in automation to speed up the fulfillment and delivery of these online grocery orders. Albertsons and Walmart are piloting in-store micro-fulfillment and Kroger is building out robot-driven warehouses and self-driving delivery vehicles. This ability to expedite online order processing will make online grocery ordering for consumers more convenient and should spur even more online grocery order growth.

NPD: Frozen Food Sales are Up (Thanks, Millennials!)

Just about this time last year we asked the question “Are We Entering a Frozen Food Renaissance?” because a wave of startups were transforming frozen foods from just bags of peas and TV dinners into something more high-end and healthy.

Looks like people are paying attention to this renaissance and ponying up for frozen food. According to a recent study from NPD, frozen foods were a part of “9.8 billion eating occasions in home, up 2 percent from a decade ago.” Two percent may not sound like much over ten years, but as NPD points out, that translates into billions of meals, and we would like to point out that can mean billions of dollars.

And in a welcome turn of events, frozen foods appear to be something millennials are not killing off, but rather, reviving. From the NPD press release:

“Demographic shifts, like Millennials moving into the busiest times of their lives juggling spouses, kids, and a career, are fueling a greater need for the convenience that frozen foods offer,” says David Portalatin, NPD Food Industry Advisor and author of Eating Patterns in America. “Manufacturers are also doing their part in increasing interest in frozen foods by innovating around contemporary food values and emerging flavor trends to provide convenience.”

We’ve seen that innovation in frozen food firsthand from companies like Mealhero, which ships pre-packaged frozen food and connected steam cooker to automatically prepare them. Buttermilk sends pre-made Indian food that can be frozen and reheated in the microwave. Daily Harvest goes after millennials directly with its delivery of frozen smoothies and bowls. And companies like Stouffers are creating entire frozen meal kits.

As NPD also points out, more than 80 percent of meals and eating happens in the home, and U.S. consumers are turning to things like frozen vegetables and chicken for cooking convenience at dinnertime. Breakfast is another growing category, thanks to things like frozen waffles and breakfast sandwiches.

With this growth, it looks like frozen food might be moving from a renaissance into a golden age.

Report: Food Robotics Market to Hit $3.1 Billion by 2025

One of the big reasons we put on our ArticulATE food robotics conference earlier this month, was that we could see the rise in automation throughout the food stack. Now Meticulous Research projects some numbers for that growth, with a report out today saying the size of the global food robotics market will hit $3.1 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 12.7 percent between 2019 and 2025.

According to the press announcement, there are a number of factor that will drive this growth, including: “increasing food safety regulations, rising demand for advanced food packaging, growing demand to improve productivity, increasing production of low-cost robots, increase in investments for automated solutions in food industry, and growing demand for reducing production cost and increasing food shelf-life leading to increased adoption of robotic systems.”

Meticulous Research predicts that articulating robots (think: Flippy) will be the most popular form of food robot because their speed and accuracy continues to improve while their price keeps dropping.

Europe is the biggest user of food robots, followed by North America and Asia-Pacific. However, Meticulous Research predicts “significant growth” in food robot use in the Asia-Pacific during the forecast period because of investment in automation as well as growing demand for food safety regulation and packaged goods.

If you follow The Spoon then this report shouldn’t be a huge surprise. For the second year in a row, there were a record number of robots shipped in North America, with the food industry among the top non-automotive sectors buying.

More anecdotally, during our ArticulATE conference, we heard from companies across the food world talking about how a growing global population and its desire to, you know, eat, combined with a labor shortage is generating increase interest automation. As this report notes, these food robots are getting better (Flippy is on its third generation), smaller and cheaper. And from my personal experience, robots are pretty great at making food as well.

Grubhub Is Finally Talking About Its Tech Ambitions and LevelUp Acquisition

Yesterday, fast-casual chain Just Salad announced it had selected Grubhub as its exclusive partner for third-party delivery. While the news is great for chopped salad enthusiasts, it’s more importantly a look at what Grubhub is planning in terms future technologies and, with that, future growth.

Part of that involves LevelUp, which Grubhub acquired for $390 million in cash in 2018. LevelUp makes restaurant-branded apps that facilitate order and payment for delivery and pickup, as well as loyalty programs. The LevelUp system can plug directly into existing point of sale (POS) systems to give restaurants a more streamlined view of their overall business, as well as easier ways to manage front and back of house. As of right now, LevelUp’s clients include Potbelly, Sweetgreen, Pret, and many others. Combined with Grubhub’s own capabilities around delivery, it’s a forceful offering in an off-premises-focused food world.

Just Salad, who operates just over 30 locations across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, is one of the first restaurants to take advantage of the full Grubhub-LevelUp tech stack, according to the press release. The combined offering will give restaurants like Just Salad the chance to streamline their orders, whether they’re from mobile or in-house, so they all go directly to the kitchen. This helps with managing the workload for employees in the kitchen, better order accuracy, and no tablet hell. Additionally, restaurants using the Grubhub-LevelUp combo can consolidate data from different orders into a single dashboard, which provides better analytics around what is (or isn’t) working.

“By building out the most robust partnership possible, we’re able to hyper-personalize guest experiences, increase Just Salad’s understanding of guest behavior, and most importantly, deliver more healthy options to more hungry people,” Seth Priebatsch, head of enterprise restaurants at Grubhub, said in the press release.

There’s a lot of action in the third-party delivery space right now, and Grubhub competitors are certainly not sitting still. Postmates filed confidentially for its IPO in February and this week expanded to 1,000 more cities. Uber recently released its S-1 financial documents ahead of its own IPO, and Uber Eats was a big part of the success story in those documents. DoorDash, meanwhile, is no longer the underdog it used to be, with a $7.1 billion valuation and questions ablaze about its own IPO.

In fact, DoorDash recently knocked Grubhub off the top spot for food delivery services in terms of consumer spending and market share. No doubt Grubhub, who went public five years ago, is trying to win some of that share back by highlighting tech capabilities like those it has with LevelUp’s software. At this point, though, Grubhub may need to find a bigger differentiator to keep up with the competition.

Yelp Has a New Initiative to Help Reduce Plastic Waste in Restaurants

Yelp gave a nod to Earth Day this morning by launching a new initiative that rates restaurants’ eco-friendliness factor.

With Yelp’s Green Practices initiative, Yelp reviewers can answer questions around a restaurant’s takeout packaging — whether the business offers compostable containers, uses plastic bags, or has discounts for things like bringing your own reusable beverage mug. The interface to do so looks and functions much like any other Yelp rating tool:

According to a blog post by Yelp product manager Jason Purdy, Yelp will use the information from the surveys “to better understand restaurant behaviors across the country and inform how we surface information about restaurant sustainability for consumers.”

Single-use plastics are just the start. Purdy noted in the same blog post that Yelp is working with a number of different partners to gather and present information about multiple sustainability issues, including the State of California Air Resource Board, the City of Los Angeles Green Business Program, and Clean Water Action’s ReThink Disposable program.

Purdy’s post also said Yelp will eliminate single-use plastic cups, plates, and utensils from all U.S. offices by the end of 2019.

Reducing packaging waste is a huge topic in the restaurant industry right now, with an ever-growing number of businesses announcing various moves to tackle their reliance on single-use plastic. Starbucks announced last year it would eliminate single-use plastic straws from its 28,000 locations by 2020. McDonald’s is trying to find a more sustainable hot/cold cup. KFC has said it will convert to renewable plastic sources by 2025.

Beyond businesses, the EU vowed it will ban single-use plastics by 2021. Stateside, Seattle became the first major U.S. city to ban single-use plastics, in 2018; California and Washington, D.C. NYC currently has legislation in place to enact a similar ban.

To be honest, there are probably enough initiatives in place at this point to fill a 1,500-word post. The question is whether they’ll have enough of an effect on consumer behavior to change our relationship with single-use plastics in restaurants. To be sure, programs like Yelp’s will get people thinking more about how much waste gets created just by getting a to-go order. Now it’s a matter of using these types of initiatives to get consumers beyond thinking and into action.

5Thru Is Using AI to Make the Drive-Thru Faster and More Personalized

It’s no secret that drive-thrus have gotten slower in recent years.

As the the QSR 2018 drive-thru study reports, major quick-service restaurants (QSRs) like McDonald’s and Wendy’s see about 70 percent of their sales come from the drive-thru window. But the same study also reported that the drive-thru experience for customers has gotten slower over time, with an average speed-of-service time at 234 seconds in 2018, compared to 225 seconds the previous year and 190 seconds back in 2003.

A consumer doesn’t need numbers to tell them the drive-thru needs improvement: just go to one on a Tuesday morning during rush hour, where lines are long, orders are incorrect, and the mini-van in front of you just ordered four extra-large frappucinos.

Long lines and clunky experiences at the drive-thru were Dan McCann’s inspiration for starting 5thru. The company uses a combination of AI, license-plate technology, and scanners to speed up the process of ordering and paying and also offer a deeper level of personalization for customers.

As a technology, 5thru isn’t live at any restaurants yet, but over the phone this week, McCann told me it’s “coming soon” and walked me through how it will change the drive-thru experience for both users and restaurant chains.

When a user pulls up to the drive-thru, a camera (which typically already exists at most drive-thrus) scans their license plate, which is connected to a customer profile (users will be able to opt in). A user’s payment info and order history are already stored in 5thru’s system and can be automatically processed, so they need never fumble with a wallet or phone to pay.

Inside the restaurant, the 5thru system processes the order and immediately displays an upsell recommendation the worker can offer the customer then and there. “Would you like a blueberry muffin with your coffee,” for example. McCann said 5thru is currently forecasting a 9 percent increase in average ticket size thanks to this recommendations engine, and that the company can up that number as the technology rolls out to more restaurants.

To get those recommendations, the system factors in a number of elements, from a customer’s past orders to the weather in their location. The idea is to create recommendations that are more personalized than most of us are used to getting when we order food from QSRs. Or, in McCann’s words, “a recommendation we think will fit you.” For example, he doesn’t want the 5thru system to ever recommend burgers to vegetarians, or hot chili to Albuquerque, NM residents in the middle of a blazing-hot summer.

The obvious benefit for restaurants here is the increased revenue, whether that comes from upsell items or recapping revenue that’s normally lost in the traditional drive-thru. McCann reckons that, start to finish, the process of having to get out a credit card or phone and hand it over to pay adds about 28 to 30 seconds to each customer’s experience at the drive-thru. “ If you’re cutting down 30 seconds a car, you can get more cars through,” he says.

Interestingly, there are no apps involved with 5thru, as McCann doesn’t believe that technology is especially suitable for the drive-thru setting: “The problem in a lot of cases is that a lot of [drive-thru orders] are impulse cravings,” he says, adding that, “You’re not going to pull your car over and start pre-ordering” should the craving for a bacon cheeseburger hit.

Instead, 5thru wants to bring the order experience into your vehicle eventually. The company is currently at work with car manufacturers to add voice-order capability, so that getting that bacon cheeseburger becomes merely a matter of telling Siri to order it, then heading to the nearest Wendy’s to get your license plate scanned.

That’s still a work in progress, and McCann, for security reasons, wasn’t able to name specific auto manufacturers. Restaurant chains who will be rolling out 5thru are also under wraps, though he did tell me that “some of the top well-known chains” are on board.

It also remains to be seen if a critical mass of people will take that step of opting into 5thru’s system and thus hand over their license plate info. To be sure, we’ll see some paranoia around this, as it’s yet-another piece of personal information consumers are giving away in the name of fast service and more personalized service. 5thru will need to put extra emphasis on the security of its system once it rolls out.

5thru isn’t discussing a specific timeframe for when their tech will be in place in restaurants. But McCann believes it’s only a matter of time before this sort of hyper-fast and hyper-personalized experience becomes the norm. Just look at McDonald’s recent acquisition of menu-personalization startup Dynamic Yield and Dunkin’s use of separate drive-thru lanes for mobile-order customers. Couple things like that with a system like 5thru, and in five years we’ll probably be looking at a very different drive-thru experience.

NPD: 93 Million American Adults are Meal Kit Curious

The potential market for meal kits isn’t tapped out, as new research from NPD finds that 93 million adults in the U.S. still haven’t tried meal kits, but want to.

NPD said that the move from mail order to retail is attracting new customers, and the research firm lists three reasons why meal kits present a big opportunity:

  1. Users are highly satisfied with their meal kit purchases both online and in-store.
  2. Users are still experimenting with brands and formats, so their habits aren’t set yet.
  3. Meal kits can be more than just dinner, providing an opportunity for new categories and brands.

NPD also outlined who is buying meal kits:

Meal kit users are more likely to be Millennials, have households with kids, and higher incomes. Online and in-store meal kits appeal to similar demographic groups although in-store kits skew to households with children less than 13 years old and higher income levels.

NPD’s numbers mirror and reinforce a recent Nielsen survey that found that retail outlets have been the main source of growth for the meal kit industry, and that 23 percent of US households would consider purchasing a meal kit in the next six months. Nielsen also found that meal kits were being purchased by more affluent households.

All of this is to say that meal kits are–to paraphrase Monty Python–not dead yet, and in fact have the potential to be very much alive and thrive. The move into retail has been a shot in the arm for the meal kit sector and the shift is just getting underway. Kroger, which owns Home Chef, and Albertsons, which owns Plated, just started the nationwide rollout of meal kits in earnest last year.

With this much headroom to grow, we can expect to see more of a marketing push to parlay shoppers’ store loyalty into meal kit loyalty.

Eatsa Unveils New Features for Virtual Restaurants, Powers Deliveroo’s Food Hall

Restaurant automation company eatsa announced yesterday a new suite of products aimed specifically at virtual restaurants and delivery-only restaurant concepts. Third-party delivery service Deliveroo is the first to use the technology, at its new food hall in Singapore.

This is eatsa’s first foray into virtual restaurants, also called ghost kitchens, which are basically restaurant-grade kitchen spaces with no dining area and, most of the time, not even a pickup area. More and more restaurants are using these to offload delivery orders from the main kitchen or test out new food concepts. Some restauranteurs also use them to kickstart a brand in a cheaper, less risky way than would be with a full-service operation.

To that end, eatsa’s new tech suite is all about making the prep, pickup, and delivery of food more efficient. New software, called the Omnichannel Intelligent Queue Software, calculates the exact status of an order based on kitchen throughput. With that capability, the eatsa app can give a customer a minute-by-minute status update. For drivers, this more precise ETA helps them know exactly when to get to the restaurant to pick up the food, so it doesn’t sit for too long.

Drivers also get some directional help via the new features — literally. Eatsa’s already known for its digital status boards it has up in restaurants. A version of these will be in the virtual kitchens, along with pickup stations. Eatsa’s shelf-like surfaces that are controlled by sensors and can display the name on the order as well as branding for the third-party service delivering the order.

The first customer for eatsa’s new features is Delveroo, who just opened another Editions site, at Alice @ Mediapolis in Singapore. Customers can order delivery or pickup from the food hall, which features 10 kitchens serving Korean, Vietnamese, Greek, and Japanese food (among other types). In the case of pickup, customers order at self-service kiosks in the hall and retrieve it from one of eatsa’s cubbies, which function much the same way as the aforementioned shelf system.

Companies across the delivery chain are now involved in virtual restaurants and ghost kitchens, from companies like Kitchen United, who rents out kitchen space, to Uber Eats, who might start peddling its own restaurants and food concepts via ghost kitchens.

Eatsa has already teamed up with a few notable names over the last couple years, for traditional restaurants, including Wow Bao in Chicago and MAC’D in San Francisco. The eatsa tech’s popularity is said to be soaring, and expanding overseas and teaming up with a high-profile company like Deliveroo seems to prove that point.

It’s smart for the company to move into the virtual kitchen space, where it’s tech could help it stand out quite a bit. As CEO Tim Young told me a while back, the company’s system is designed to make restaurant operations easier and more efficient, and it’s end-to-end, which means you can roll up every step of your operation into a single system. As restaurants large and small adjust to a world where mobile order and delivery needs to be as efficient as in-house dining, an all-in-one automated platform like eatsa’s could solve several problems at once.

Toast Launches Real-Time Guest Feedback Tools for Restaurants

Real-time guest feedback is becoming the norm at restaurants, and today, restaurant-tech company Toast unveiled via press release a suite of new features meant to make it easier for customers to rate their meals and for restaurant managers and operators to understand and act on their feedback.

Toast Guest Feedback, as the new features suite is dubbed, lets restaurants collect guest feedback via the Toast Go and Toast Digital Receipts software. Toast Go is a handheld POS system made specifically for the restaurant industry. Both the hardware and software are Toast products. With the device, servers can take orders, receive real-time menu updates, swipe a customer’s credit card, and coordinate with the back of house so that cooks no longer have to scream “order up!” when someone’s food is ready.

With Guest Feedback, the Toast Go device also lets guests leave feedback about their experience via the touchscreen tablet in the form of thumb-up-thumb-down ratings. It also lets users type in comments on their experience. That feedback is processed in real time and, if they choose, managers can opt to receive SMS alerts every time a guest leaves a negative comment or review. Toast Guest Feedback can also run a report summarizing all reviews, so operators can see patterns and trends: what’s working, and what isn’t. Guest Feedback integrated into Toast Digital Receipts works much the same way, except for to-go food.

Right now, only about 2 percent of restaurant customers take the time to fill out a survey or comment card at the end of a meal. Having a digital, easy-to-use method for this could increase that number, and up the amount of information a restaurant can use to assess quality of service, popular foods, and other aspects of day-to-day operations.

Toast is hardly alone. Company Presto just raised $30 million, in part for its wearable tech that lets servers and managers see real-time feedback from guests. Square’s restaurant POS system allows the restaurant to communicate directly with a guest through the digital receipt and provides owners and managers a comprehensive summary of guest feedback.

Implementing real-time feedback brings a lot of obvious pluses to any restaurant operation. It’s easier to resolve a dispute or sooth an unhappy customer if said person is still in the restaurant when management is informed. The summary feature seems particularly useful, as it can alert managers to repeat issues in very clear terms. If five guests complain about the state of their after-dinner lattes, it might be time to retrain the staff on how to make those drinks. And Toast’s feature is already reportedly upping the amount of money individual servers bank each year, since the system as a whole makes it easier to tip, even suggesting tip amounts that might be higher than a guest might leave with cash.

One thing restaurant owners and managers will need to keep in mind with this brave new world of guest feedback: technology can’t communicate that some people are just assholes who take their frustrations out on servers. Not everyone, and not even most. My decade-long experience working in restaurants tells me the majority of people are reasonable, and that using real-time feedback as an alert, a manager could resolve an issue and therefore any negative tension before a guest even leaves the premises.

To be honest, a bigger problem than guests abusing the feedback feature is whether a constant stream of ratings will upset servers’ mental space during busy shifts and cause unnecessary tension. That’s one thing Presto has sought to address with its wearables: they only alert managers for super-important issues (as deemed by the restaurant), not every little gripe or hiccup.

Still, most owners and managers at restaurants worked their way up the ranks and have at one point or another stood in that server’s shoes. Real-time, tech-driven feedback has some horror stories to tell, to be sure. But I do think most folks working in the restaurant will be able to see the difference between a real problem and a high-maintenance customer, and real-time feedback will prove itself a huge help rather than make someone’s job miserable.

Record Number of Robots Shipped in 2018, Food Sector Among Big Buyers

I’m feeling some deja vu. A record number of robots were shipped in North America last year, according to new stats released yesterday from the Robotics Industry Association (RIA), part of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3). The food industry was among the top non-automotive sectors buying.

From the press announcement:

35,880 units were shipped in 2018, a 7 percent increase over 2017, with 16,702 shipments to non-automotive companies, up 41 percent. Notable growth came in areas like food and consumer goods (48 percent), plastics and rubber (37 percent), life sciences (31 percent), and electronics (22 percent).

Like the remainder in The Matrix, I feel like I’ve written this before because I did when A3 announced record shipments at the end of 2017.

For comparison, the A3’s 2017 report said that 27,294 orders for robots were placed during the first nine months of that year, with food and consumer goods accounting for 21 percent of that total. Caveat: it’s not a one-to-one comparison as the 2017 report only accounted for nine months, but you can see the general growth year-over-year, especially when it comes to percentage of shipments to food and consumer goods (an admittedly broad category) companies.

Additionally, in its press release, the A3 called out the fact that robot buyers are not just large, multi-national companies anymore; more small and medium-sized businesses are using robots now as well.

This kind of data isn’t surprising to us at The Spoon, as we spent a good part of 2018 chronicling the rise of robots throughout the food stack. From hauling gear on farms, to micro-fulfillment centers in the back of grocery stores, to robot restaurants and little rover bots delivering meals, robots are an increasingly central part of the meal journey.

I expect I’ll be writing about 2019 being another record year for robot shipments this time next year.

Study: Gen Z is All About Snack Portability, Restaurant Delivery

I’m at an age where I can recognize the things that are for me (khakis), and the things that aren’t (Snapchat, staying out past 10 p.m.). So I always appreciate market research studies that give me insight into what the younger generations are up to. A pair of reports out recently from NPD Group (h/t to The Food Institute Blog) shed some light on how Genz Z (the eldest of which will be 22 this year) are approaching their food choices.

In its “The Future of Snacking” report, NPD found that what Gen Z cares about most is portability. From the NPD press release: “… regardless of the brand, for Generation Z, if they can’t take a snack with them, it’s not really a snack.” NPD also said, “A large percentage of this generational group have been raised to put a greater emphasis on the quality of food, whether it’s clean, fresh, or nutritionally beneficial, as well as its flavor and function.”

With these data points in mind, it’s not hard to envision a growing market opportunity for upstart, upcycled snack companies like ReGrained, Render and Pulp Pantry, as these socially conscious startups tick off a lot of the boxes Gen Z are looking for.

The convenience Gen Z craves extends to their restaurant habits as well. According to NPD, Gen Zs made 14.6 billion restaurant visits in 2018 and now make up 10 percent all foodservice traffic. But they are also a generation raised on the internet and apps, so they are quite keen on ordering delivery from restaurants. In its Delivering Digital Convenience report, NPD found: “In the year ending December 2018, foodservice delivery orders by Gen Zs amounted to 552 million, just a million shy of Millennials’ delivery orders and only a portion of Gen Zs are old enough to order their own delivery.”

That last bit about age is important. Delivery already makes up 30 percent of the restaurant business. As more Gen Zs become old enough to order their own meals (and booze!), the convenience of delivery is only going to grow. This market lying in wait helps explain DoorDash’s $7.1 billion valuation and why we’ll need more robots and drones to help keep up with delivery demand.

Which is fine by me, as long as they don’t make any noise past 10 p.m.