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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Delivery & Commerce

Domino’s Used More Tech to Address Labor Challenges in Q2

For Domino’s, combatting the restaurant industry’s current labor shortage means adopting more tech to make operating procedures more efficient. Speaking on this week’s earnings call, CEO Ritch Allison said his company is “absolutely working on technologies and operating procedures to help us run our stores more efficiently, and with less labor.”

One major development relates to the delivery drivers themselves. Allison noted that Domino’s is currently “trying to take a lot of things off of their plates that cause them to do anything other than being in a car, delivering a pizza or on a bike, delivering a pizza to a customer.” A non-tech example he mentions is removing the task of pre-folding pizza boxes from their workload. More than 2,000 Domino’s locations in the U.S. no longer use this method, which frees up delivery drivers’ time. 

More tech-related are the efforts Domino’s has made around integrating more GPS software to its processes and making it available to drivers on their own phones. Allison said that in the “old days,” it might take a driver two to three months to really learn a geographic area and be able to navigate it quickly and without mistakes. GPS speeds up this process.

The company started expanding its GPS-tracking system back in 2019. As time has moved on and third-party delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats have gotten bigger, GPS has become a priority for Domino’s partly as a way to stay as fast and efficient as those services. 

Allison also noted on the call that Domino’s is now using machine learning to predict sales at a store and “more appropriately matching the number of team members at the store at the times when we need them.”

Despite staffing issues this past quarter, Domino’s second-quarter U.S. sales were up 3.5 percent. International sales were up by double digits. International sales were up by double digits. “COVID’s strong sales, the accelerating economic growth and ongoing government stimulus continue to result in one of the most difficult staffing environments that we’ve seen in a long time.”

He added that in addition to the above changes, Domino’s expects to see some wage increases in the future, too. 

Will Gopuff’s (Second) Billion-Dollar Funding Round Make its Grocery Competition Go Poof?

In addition to delivering groceries fast, Gopuff is pretty speedy when it comes to raising big sums of money. Bloomberg and Axios both reported yesterday that Gopuff is raising an additional $1 billion in funding, according to sources familiar with the matter. This new money comes just months after Gopuff raised $1.5 billion in March, and will give the company a $15 billion post-money valuation.

Like others in the space, Gopuff operates a network of dark stores in the U.S. that deliver goods like groceries in 30 minutes, 24 hours a day. But unlike its competition here, Gopuff has raised a ton more money. If this latest round does indeed close next week, the company will have raised nearly $3.5 billion since 2015. By comparison, other speedy grocery services have far less funding: Gorillas has raised $335M, Fridge No More raised $16.9M, JOKR raised $170M, and Food Rocket raised $2M.

Gopuff is also a little different from its competitors in its value proposition. Those other services promise super-fast delivery of groceries in as few as 10 minutes. Because they deliver to a very limited radius, they can tailor their inventories to the particular tastes of the neighborhood they serve. But those services are also very small right now. Three are only in New York City (Gorillas, Fridge No More, JOKR), and two are in San Francisco (Food Rocket, Gorillas). Gopuff, on the other hand, has more than 300 facilities operating in 550 cities across the U.S. With another $1 billion, Gopuff can accelerate its expansion and grab market share before the competition can even get out of their hometown.

But speedy, on-demand grocery delivery will soon become commonplace in big cities, if you believe the CEO of Food Rocket. As such, we are starting to see these speedy grocery services start to differentiate. Food Rocket, for instance, is adding branded ready-to-eat meals and ghost kitchens to make even more types of delivery friendly meals. But there, too, goes Gopuff: the company has been hiring out kitchen staff and managers for its own ghost kitchen services so it can deliver its own meals.

Gopuff’s biggest competitor might actually be DoorDash at this point. DoorDash has a nationwide delivery network and infrastructure, is expanding aggressively into grocery, has a ton of money thanks to its IPO, operates its own growing line of delivery only DashMart convenience stores, and has its own ghost kitchen program. With another billion in the bank, Gopuff has the goods and the cash now to have a go at DoorDash.

I quipped on Linkedin earlier this week that it would be weird if your speedy grocery delivery service didn’t raise over $100 million. Given Gopuff’s furious fundraising pace, I might have to adjust my joke.

Plant-Based Cheese Company Nobell Foods Raises $75M

Plant-based cheesemaker Nobell Foods announced a $75 million Series B fundraise and launched out of stealth mode this week.

The round was led by investment group Breakthrough Energy Ventures and included participation from new investors Hillhouse Capital Group and Footprint Coalition. Existing investors AgFunder, Andreesen Horowitz, Mission Bay Capital, Fifty Years, New Crop Capital, Germin8 Ventures, former Muse frontman Matt Bellamy, and Pear VC also took part. Nobell has now raised $100 million in total, according to Fast Company, which was first to report the news.

Nobell will use the new funds to commercialize its first plant-based cheese products, including mozzarella, which the company makes from soybeans that are genetically edited to produce casein. Casein, a protein unique to milk, is a major contributor to the texture, taste, and melt-a-bility of cheese. It’s also an element most plant-based cheeses out there lack, which is why so many fall short of the mark when it comes to adequately mimicking the real thing. 

Nobell effectively trains soybeans to produce this casein. The company has been quietly developing this method for the last four years, and says it could wind up being cheaper than the costs of producing cheese using cow’s milk. 

Cheese comes with a heavy environmental footprint. As demand for dairy has increased, so too has the percentage of global emissions the sector produces. Cheese, in particular, is highly resource intensive. 

There are many, many plant-based cheese options out there. Most of them can’t replicate the taste, texture, and mouthfeel of dairy-based cheese yet, largely because they don’t contain the aforementioned casein.

However, Nobell isn’t quite the only company out there producing the protein from alternative sources, though it’s the only one using plants for the process. A company called New Culture uses genetically modified microbes like yeast to produce casein, training these microbes to make the protein. Alt-dairy company Perfect Day also uses genetically modified microbes. 

In a statement on the Nobell website, founder Magi Richani says that cheese is “the last frontier, the insurmountable thing” most consumers won’t get up. With Nobell, she aims to ensure these consumers don’t have to give it up and can still enjoy, stretchy, melty, tasty cheese without further compromising the health of the planet.  

InFarm Bets on Modular for the Future of CEA Growing

Much of the recent news (and investment dollars) in vertical farming has centered on massive, stationary plant factories that produce pounds of leafy greens in the millions. 

Bucking this norm — and possibly building a new one for indoor agriculture in the process — is a company called InFarm. Those that follow indoor ag developments closely will be familiar with the name, and may even have purchased greens at one of the stores where the company keeps its farms.

The Berlin, Germany-based company, founded in 2013, has long been known for its small, pod-like hydroponic farms it installs in grocery stores in restaurants. Greens can be harvested onsite — a major advantage when it comes to leafy greens, which are delicate and often get harmed during shipping and distribution. These mini-farms are currently in a few hundred locations around the world.

Earlier this year, the company also launched the first of a planned 15 InFarm Growing Center facilities. Each of these will produce the equivalent of 10,000 square meters of farmland, which is 1 hectare or about 2.47 acres in traditional farmland.  

Modularity is a key component of both concepts, as is the idea of a decentralized network of farms that share data with a main hub. Right now, the norm for vertical farming tends towards large, warehouse-sized farms that are stationary and can therefore only serve certain regions. Typically, companies like West Coast-based Plenty or AeroFarms in the Northeast and Kalera in the South distribute their greens to grocery retailers within a certain distance, usually no more than one day’s drive. If these companies want to expand to new markets, another lengthy construction must be planned and executed.

InFarm’s pods don’t go up overnight, but as CEO Erez Galonska explained to The Spoon recently, the company can respond more quickly to demand in any given area because of the pods’ modular design. For example, a farm might be built and operating within six weeks, versus eighteen months for a larger, less mobile build like those of other vertical farm companies.

Size-wise, InFarm’s units are anywhere between 30 and 100 feet tall. At maximum capacity, they can produce more than 500,000 plants per year. For now, crops are largely in the leafy greens space, though InFarm did recently say it is expanding its crop capabilities to mushrooms, tomatoes, and chilis. Galonska says the company has more than 75 products, and eventually wants “to fulfill our ultimate goal of offering the whole vegetable and fruit baskets.”

Leafy greens require fewer inputs (water, energy) than other vegetables to grow, which is one of the reasons they’re such a popular crop. And as was recently explained by World Wildlife Fund, energy consumption is still a major hurdle (among others) for indoor farming, and one reason the sector hasn’t moved far beyond leafy greens.

Collecting more data on plant growth and optimal growing conditions could help companies like InFarm eventually lower costs. It’s one of the reasons we see more and more indoor farming companies now talk about their “network,” where all farms are connected to the same network and feed data on plant growth back to the main system. InFarm’s units connect to the company’s HQ via the cloud and generate billions of data points that inform InFarm research and production. 

“The most important factor is the quantity and quality of the data that we are able to collect and generate insights from,” says Galonska. “Embedded in each and every one of our farms are more than 75 lab-grade sensors. Using hyperspectral cameras and scanning lasers, we track growth speed, photosynthesis activity and stress responses of our crops, giving real time biofeed back to how our plants are doing.”

He adds that his company has seen an 82 percent reduction in unit costs since 2018 and a 240 percent improvement in yield. The challenge, of course, will be continuing to get those gains as the company widens its crop varieties outside of the leafy green realm.

Galonska agrees that vertical farming is still a fairly capital-intensive business, which is another reason InFarm has chosen a de-centralized network for its business. “If you think of larger-scale farms, they require a lot of upfront investment and can take some time to set up,” he says. “We took a modular approach to help address this, reducing the amount of cash needed to start operations and speeding up the process.”

AiFi Retrofitting Two More Loop Neighborhood Stores with Cashierless Checkout Tech

AiFi announced today that it is adding its cashierless checkout technology to two Loop Neighborhood store locations in California, starting in the San Francisco Bay Area. The deal expands on an existing partnership that saw the two companies opening a fully autonomous gas station NanoStore in Campbell, California in 2019.

AiFi retrofits stores with cameras to create a computer vision-based cashierless checkout system, allowing customers to walk in, grab what they want, and leave, getting charged automatically on their way out. For these new Loop Neighborhood stores, customers will use the AiFi app to scan a QR code upon entering or leaving the store so they can skip the checkout line.

AiFi x Loop Neighborhood: Autonomous stores in Silicon Valley

Cashierless checkout has been gaining momentum throughout 2021, with a number of startups getting funded and system installations going public. It’s been a particularly busy year for AiFi, which entered into a partnership with Dutch convenience store chain Wundermart that will eventually see 1,000 autonomous locations opened up. AiFi also partnered with Verizon to open a 5G-powered popup NanoStore at this year’s Indianapolis 500. Most recently, the company opened an autonomous NanoStore with the Polish convenience chain Żabka.

But AiFi isn’t alone in advancing autonomous retail this year. Zippin has opened up a store in the Barclay’s Center in New York. Trigo is opening cashierless checkout with the Rewe grocery chain in Germany. And Amazon opened up its first full-sized cashierless checkout grocery store in Washington state.

There are a few reasons for all of this accelerated interest in cashierless checkout. First the pandemic (which hasn’t gone away) is pushing retailers to reduce the amount of human-to-human interaction in their stores. Cashierless checkout not only removes a human cashier from the shopping equation, but also means customers don’t have to stand in line next to each other. Additionally, cashierless checkout can benefit the retailer with more real-time insight into shelf inventories. Cameras and sensors keep tabs on what people are picking up and putting back, so managers can identify shortages more quickly.

AiFi’s CEO recently told me that while there is a lot of news and excitement around cashierless checkout, mainstream adoption is still about a decade away. Which means we’ll be writing about similar store openings for a long time to come.

AiFi didn’t disclose exactly where the new cashierless Loop stores will open, but if you’re in the Bay Area and stumble across one, be sure to tell us about your experience with it!

Delivery Service Swiggy Raises $1.25B

Indian delivery service Swiggy has closed a $1.25 billion round of Series J funding led by Softbank Vision Fund 2 and Prosus Ventures, according to TechCrunch. Qatar Investment Authority, Falcon Edge Capital, Amansa Capital, Goldman Sachs, Think Investments and Carmignac participated in the fundraising, as well as existing investors Accel Partners and Wellington Management.

The “heavily oversubscribed” round includes the $800 million the company raised earlier this year. To date, Swiggy has raised $2.9 billion in funding and has a post-money valuation of $5.5 billion.

Like its rival Zomato (who filed to go public in April 2021), Swiggy is best known across India for its restaurant food delivery service. However, Swiggy’s Chief Executive Sriharsha Majety said that this new funding will also help accelerate its non-food categories in addition to traditional restaurant delivery. “I believe the next 10-15 years offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for companies like Swiggy as the Indian middle class expands and our target segment for convenience grows to 500 million users,” he told TC.

In 2020, Swiggy expanded its service to include delivery of grocery, household items, and laundry, among other categories. 

Zomato, too, has branched out beyond restaurant delivery with its Zomato Marketplace that connects restaurant owners with suppliers of non-food items. The company raised $1.3 billion in its IPO recently. 

The move to offer more than just restaurant meals is similar to developments in other parts of the world. A chief example is DoorDash, the U.S.-based company that added grocery services in 2020 and has also since expanded its “dark convenience store” service. Uber has also started offering non-restaurant food delivery.

In addition to the major companies, an entirely new pack of speedy delivery services has emerged and promises basic food and household items in a fraction of the time it takes a restaurant meal to get cooked and delivered.

Speedy delivery has yet to reach India in any major capacity. When it does, it will add yet-more competition to the already uber-competitive Indian delivery market.

Zenput Raises $27M to Manage Operations for Multi-Unit Restaurants

Restaurant operations tech company Zenput has raised $27 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Golub Capital with participation by existing investors, including Jackson Square Ventures, MHS Capital, and Goldcrest Capital. It brings Zenput’s total funding to date to over $47 million, according to a company press release. 

San Francisco-based Zenput calls its tech an “operations execution platform.” With it, multi-unit restaurant operators, grocery stores, and convenience stores can release new operating procedures and health and safety protocols and enforce them across all units. Businesses can update all of their locations at the same time whenever a new policy or procedure gets rolled out. Zenput can also track how well each unit is complying with standards and procedures. The system can also be used to distribute new promotional campaigns across all units. 

Leading brands in the restaurant and convenience store industries, including Chipotle, Five Guys, P.F. Chang’s, and 7-Eleven, are current customers of Zenput.

Zenput says it has “approximately” 100 percent revenue growth over the last year and saw daily activities on the platform increase by 150 percent per store. The platform’s apparent popularity makes sense, given that restaurants have had to continually change and update policies in order to accommodate COVID-19-related restrictions and regulations. “The challenges of the past year really underscored for our customers the criticality of being able to manage the complexities and overall execution of work in one central place, especially when an operator might have dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations,” Vladik Rikhter, Zenput’s CEO and cofounder, said in a statement.  

He added that the new funds will largely go towards building new products that can address additional areas of operations. 

Zenput currently serves over 500 customers across 50,000 locations in 40 different countries. The funding will also go towards expanding this customer base. 

No Foolin’, JOKR Raises $170M Series A for Speedy Grocery Delivery

JOKR is the latest speedy grocery delivery startup to have raised a nine-figure round of funding. The company announced today that it has raised a $170 million a Series A round led by GGV Capital, Balderton Capital and Tiger Global Management. Activant Capital, Greycrot, FJ Labs, Kaszek, Monashees and HV Capital also participated.

Like other startups in the space, JOKR operates a network of small, delivery-only grocery stores that carry a limited number of items and have a small delivery radius. With this model, JOKR can tailor inventory to a specific neighborhood, sell local products (i.e., bakery goods), and deliver within 10 to 15 minutes of the customer placing an order.

JOKR’s big fundraise comes just three months after it started operations and a month and half after it launched its grocery delivery services in New York City. According to a press announcement sent to The Spoon, JOKR said that since it started operations it has opened up a new hub roughly every day and now operates 10 hubs in New York, and 100 hubs across nine cities including São Paolo, Brazil; Mexico City, Mexico; Bogota, Colombia; Lima, Peru; Warsaw, Poland; and Vienna, Austria.

Of course, JOKR isn’t the only speedy grocery delivery service bringing in big funding. In fact, it would be odd if JOKR hadn’t raised more than $100 million. Gopuff raised $1.5 billion in March to grow its delivery service. Last month Germany’s Flink raised $240 million, and Turkey’s Getir raised $550 million (after raising $300 million in March). Germany-based Gorillas raised $290 million in March, launched its own U.S. operations in NYC at the end of May, and is already expanding to San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Vitaly Alexandrov, CEO of the San Francisco-based Food Rocket speedy grocery service, recently told me that in order for his business to work, one hub needs to be able to service 50,000 households. That means that at some point not too far off, all of these services are going to be vying for the same markets. Alexandrov said that eventually 10-minute grocery delivery will become a commodity, which is why Food Rocket is looking to differentiate itself with ready to eat meals, ghost kitchens and will eventually open up its logistics and delivery platform to other retailers. Gopuff too, is diversifying by getting into the ghost kitchen business as well.

Despite all this funding, we don’t yet know if or how consumers will take to this new, utility-style model of grocery shopping. Many of these services don’t have order minimums or delivery fees, but will that be sustainable as they scale? Will consumers place large enough orders to keep these businesses going or will these services burn out a la Kozmo.com?

We’ll learn the answers to these questions over the coming months but one thing we know already: Most of these startups won’t fail because of a lack of funding.

Choco Raises $100M to Digitize Restaurant Food Procurement

Restaurant tech company Choco announced today it has raised $100 million in in Series B funding led by growth equity firm Left Lane Capital. Insight Partners along with existing investors Coatue Management and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Choco has raised $171.5 million to date.

The company’s mobile app effectively digitizes the relationship between restaurants and their suppliers, allowing the two groups to chat with one another through the app. Restaurants can place orders directly through the Choco app as well as view and edit all order sheets. Choco also released a new feature at the beginning of 2021 specifically designed for multi-unit restaurants to give them a more comprehensive overview of not just what they’re ordering but where it comes from and who is in charge of that relationship. At the time, Choco’s Global Industry Advisor, Chelsea van Hooven, said multi-unit restaurants make up about 40 percent of Choco’s current user base.

The company’s original pitch was around fighting food waste in the restaurant industry. While that remains a part of Choco’s overall benefits for restaurants, wasted time and money are also now part of the overall package of benefits the company is pitching. Replacing siloed paper-and-pen processes with digital ones, where all data is viewable from a single place, has the potential to cut hidden costs in the back of house and in doing so improve restaurant margins. 

Digital was largely seen as a “nice-to-have” feature before the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Now, many claim that digitizing operations is a “must have,” and that those who don’t will wind up getting left behind.

While that may be true for large chains (think McDonald’s or Chipotle), it remains to be seen how much this full digitization of the back of house can actually help smaller independent restaurants. In other words, we have yet to see whether the cost to implement and run technology is worth the returns it brings to these smaller restaurants.

Choco says demand for its platform is up and partly driven by the pandemic pushing more restaurants to go digital. The company currently has over 10,000 active restaurants and suppliers on its platform. It will use the new funding to expand within its six current markets: the United States, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, and Belgium. The company will also expand into several new markets, and has plans to double its head count by end of the year.

Halla Raises $4.5M for Its Food Recommendation Platform

Halla, the AI-powered production recommendation service for grocery retail, announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in Series A1 funding, led by Food Retail Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Halla to $8.5 million.

Halla’s platform integrates with a grocer’s existing digital commerce solution to provide customized product recommendations and substitutions for out of stock items to consumers. But Halla’s platform doesn’t just rely on previous purchases to make its recommendations. The company says it uses more than 100 billion shopper and product data points to predict what a shopper is looking for. Halla’s product video embedded below illustrates how Halla’s the system looks at all kinds of data about a shopper as it makes a recommendation in real time.

Grocery has been the beneficiary of a ton of funding this year, with $10 billion going into the sector as of July this year. Most of of the funding and attention has been around speedy grocery delivery services, but money has been doled out to startups working up and down the grocery stack. Hungryroot, and online grocer that uses machine learning for predictive recommendations, raised $40 million last month. In April, Trax raised $640 million for its computer vision-based inventory management system, and Shelf Engine raised $41 million for its perishable inventory management platform.

A big reason for all this money flowing into grocery is the pandemic. Fears around COVID-19 sent record amounts of people into online grocery shopping last year, creating new logistical and fulfillment issues for retailers. But the pandemic also highlighted flaws in our existing grocery supply chain, as evidenced by the panic hoarding and empty shelves that happened at the beginning of the outbreak. All of this is to say there are a bunch of new issues for grocery retailers to solve post-pandemic, which means plenty of opportunities for startups.

Halla said that a “top-5 U.S. grocer” is currently running Halla in more than 1,100 e-commerce storefronts. Halla will use the new funding to double the number of stores it’s in, and double its headcount by 2022.

Rise Gardens Raises $9M in Series A Funding

Rise Gardens has raised $9 million in an oversubscribed Series A Round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. The round was led by TELUS Ventures with participation from existing investors True Ventures and Amazon Alexa Fund and new investor Listen Ventures. It brings Rise’s total funding to date to $13 million. 

New funds will go towards product development and expansion, according to the company. As of right now, Rise Gardens makes an IoT-connected hydroponic grow system for the consumer home. The company provides the farming system, seed pods, nutrients for the water, and accompanying mobile app that users can rely on to monitor and manage plant growth. The garden comes in three sizes, plus a tabletop version that was released at the end of last year. 

As of right now, there are no voice control features on the gardens. But Rise CEO Hank Adams hinted last year at an eventual collaboration with Amazon that would bring Alexa functionality to the system. The Amazon Alexa Fund’s involvement in today’s funding round suggests that ambition is still very much in the plans. Rise will also in the near future sell its gardens via Amazon, marking the first time the product will be available via something other than the company’s direct-to-consumer channel.

Rise is one of a number of companies trying to bring the concept of high-tech gardening into consumers’ homes. Other notables right now include Gardyn, which makes a compact indoor-only unit, Lettuce Grow’s Farmstand, which can work both indoors and outdoors, and Hong Kong-based Aspara’s countertop unit.

All of these systems use hydroponics to grow leafy greens and herbs. They also all, at this point, come with a hefty price tag: Rise’s Single-Family Garden starts at $549 USD, for example, while a Lettuce Grow unit that holds 24 plants and includes LED lights costs $849.

Adams said today that part of its new funds will go towards reaching “an even wider audience in the U.S., Canada and around the world.”  

Uber Expands Grocery Delivery to 400 US Cities, Adds Albertsons Brands as Partners

Uber’s grocery delivery service is now available in more than 400 cities across the U.S., according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The company has also added Albertsons retail brands to its delivery platform.

The move marks a big jump for Uber, which started its grocery delivery business in the U.S. a little more than a year ago, growing it to 100 cities. With today’s expansion, Uber’s grocery delivery will be available in major markets such as Miami, Dallas, New York City, Washington D.C. and for the first time in California by way of San Francisco.

At the same time, Uber also bulked up its retail partnerships with the addition of Albertsons stores to its platforms. Over the course of this year, Uber will roll out delivery to 1,200 Albertsons stores including Albertsons, Safeway, Jewel-Osco, ACME, Tom Thumb, Randalls and more.

Uber got into the grocery delivery game in July of 2020 following its purchase of a majority stake in Latin American online grocery delivery marketplace Cornershop in 2019. Since that time, grocery delivery has seen an explosion in usage, thanks in large part to the pandemic, which makes it an attractive market for a logistics company like Uber. Last month, SEC filings showed that Uber was acquiring the remaining 47 percent of Cornershop.

Unlike the modern ride sharing-business, which Uber basically invented, the company will be facing a lot of competition for your grocery delivery dollar. DoorDash, which started out in restaurant delivery has made its own aggressive moves into grocery delivery and announced its own partnership with Albertsons last month. And of course Uber will be going up against Instacart, the 800-pound gorilla in third-party grocery delivery.

But perhaps the more interesting competition in major cities for Uber will come from the rapidly expanding speedy grocery delivery startups, which promise to get you your groceries in as few as 10 minutes. Services like JOKR and Fridge No More are expanding across New York City. Gorillas is hopping beyond New York and into San Francisco, where Food Rocket also operates.

These services all operate small, delivery-only grocery stores with a limited delivery radius. They are also vertically integrated, controlling their inventory and employing their own drivers. As Food Rocket CEO, Vitaly Alexandrov recently told me, having their own fleet of delivery people gives his company an advantage over services like Uber and Instacart. When an order is placed by the customer, the network doesn’t have to spend time finding a driver who will take the job. There is already a dedicated staffer on hand to make deliveries go out faster.

DoorDash operates its own line of DashMart delivery-only convenience stores, and Instacart is reportedly looking to build out its own automated fulfillment centers. With all this competition, will Uber, which has famously built its empire by emphatically not owning parts of its business like its driver network, need to cave and develop a more owned and operated stack?

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we’ll have to see if Uber customers will even use Uber for grocery delivery on a massive scale.