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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

college delivery

Yandex Delivery Robots Coming to College Campuses Courtesy of Grubhub

Food delivery service Grubhub announced today that it will be bringing delivery robots to college campuses this fall thanks to a new multi-year partnership with Russian tech giant Yandex.

Yandex’s rovers are squat, cooler-sized robots that can autonomously traverse pre-mapped areas. As yet, there aren’t a ton of public details on the partnership, such as where the the robot delivery will launch or how much it will cost, but in the press announcement, Yandex said it would be deploying “dozens” of its robots for the program.

College campuses are actually a pretty great environment for last-mile delivery robots. Campuses hold large populations that eat at all hours of the day and night. They are contained geographic with ample pedestrian walkways, and they can be difficult for full-sized delivery cars and drivers to navigate. Robots and their contactless delivery can also be of use in these post-pandemic times for students packed in college dorms. Should someone living on campus get sick, they don’t need to leave their room and stand in line with other people in the cafeteria. Instead, they can ring up a robot and have food delivered, reducing their human-to-human contact.

As such, colleges are among the first places to deploy delivery robots. Starship operates at a growing number of colleges throughout the U.S., and Kiwibot is ramping up its own college food delivery programs as well. Grubhub has existing partnerships with more than 250 college campuses across the U.S., integrating student meal plans with delivery from on- and off- campus restaurants.

In addition to giving Grubhub a robotic entrée onto college campuses, this partnership also gives Yandex its first foray into the U.S. market. Yandex has been making meal deliveries around the Russian cities of Moscow and Innopolis since December of last year.

Students at Columbia Develop New Food Delivery App for Dining Halls

Students at Columbia University have developed a food delivery service specifically geared towards getting food from dining halls around campus. Called Grubify, the app-based service got official approval from the university last week and will launch a beta program, according to the Columbia Spectator.

The Grubify app was designed specifically to make the process of getting food from the dining hall easier for students. Founders Kidus Zelalem, Amir Mustefa, and Noah Velazquez got the idea for the app last year after noticing that many students struggled to actually get to the dining room for meals because of health reasons and hectic schedules. At the same time, delivery via the usual suspects (Grubhub, DoorDash, etc.) is expensive.

Grubify solves both problems by offering an app that integrates with students’ existing meal plans. Students pay for meals with swipes from their dining plans, and can order from a number of campus-owned dining halls and locations. The only extra charge is a delivery fee, which is calculated based on current traffic at the dining hall and a student’s distance from the location they are ordering from. The app takes payments through platforms like Apple Pay as well as a Venmo-like system the company developed called Grubify Cash.

“The app is optimized so that orders are routed to the most convenient deliverer because of the ecosystem we’re in and our knowledge of the campus,” Velazquez told the Columbia Spectator.

To that end, the service employs current Columbia students as couriers who drop off the actual food. Couriers can accept or reject deliveries much as they would on any other food delivery app then cash out immediately after the food is dropped off to receive payment in their bank accounts.

Though its service is currently only available at Columbia right now, Grubify is actually an independent business from the university, and the founders hope to take it to other schools in future.

The company’s plans for expansion makes sense. College campuses are fertile grounds for food delivery at the moment. Snackpass, which was founded at Yale in 2017, just raised $21 million for its app. Foodservice giant Aramark, which supplies many college campuses around the U.S. acquired Good Uncle in 2019. Grubhub acquired Tapingo in 2018, and let’s not forget about the delivery bots from Starship, Kiwi, and others currently roving around many campuses now.

For its part, Grubify told the Spectator it is in talks with university foodservice providers and hopes to expand to other schools in the future. Interestingly, the next few weeks could be a real test of how in-demand an app that integrates with student dining plans could be. The NY Post reported over the weekend that Columbia is cancelling two days of classes this week due to the coronavirus outbreak. As concerns around being in large crowds of people grow, more students may be holing up in their dorm rooms and ordering meals for delivery. In which case, Grubify may see a surge in demand for its service in the very near future.

Starship Launches Robot Food Delivery Fleet at George Mason University

Starship Technologies announced that starting today lazy tech-savvy students at George Mason University can get food and drinks delivered via robot anywhere on campus.

A fleet of more than 25 robots will be deployed at launch at the Fairfax, VA school, which, the company says, is “the largest implementation of autonomous robot food delivery services on a university campus.” The program was created in partnership with food facilities management company, Sodexo North America, and allows students and faculty to use the “Starship Deliveries” mobile app to order food and beverages from Blake Pizza, Starbucks and Dunkin’, with more campus eateries to be announced “in the coming weeks.” The new service works with the George Mason’s student meal plans, and charges $1.99 delivery fee to anywhere on campus between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9 p.m..

Campuses have been on Starship’s radar screen for a while now. In April of last year the company said that it would be deploying 1,000 robots to corporate and academic campuses by the end of 2018 (Starship has since backed off that number and in an emailed statement said instead they’d been focusing on “new offerings to cater to the needs of our customers and partners including our new package delivery service, and spending more time working with local charities and organizations to ensure every member of the community is confident and comfortable using our technology.”). The company has raised $42.2 million in venture funding and counts Daimler Benz as an investor. Its robots have already been hard at work making deliveries on Intuit’s corporate campus, and roaming the town of Milton Keys, Britain, delivering packages and groceries.

When asked how Starship was making money through this George Mason deal– Was it just through the delivery fee? Was it through leasing the robots or a revenue split?– the company simply replied that it “uses different revenue models depending on location,” and that it “sometimes charge[s] a margin on top of the delivery fee.”

Colleges are becoming a hotbed of robot activity. Kiwi has been making robot deliveries to the University of California Berkeley, and expanded to Los Angeles with an eye towards delivering to UCLA. And more recently, Pepsi enlisted Robby robots for mobile snack commerce at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA.

George Mason and the University of the Pacific programs are a little different however. Starship robots will be making straight point-to-point deliveries of ordered meals and drinks from eateries to anywhere on the GM campus. For its robot run, Pepsi is basically using an autonomous roving mini-mart filled with snacks and drinks that you can pre-order and/or buy on the spot, and will only show up to designated areas on campus.

College and corporate campuses are actually a great place to run autonomous robot delivery pilots. You have a lot of people confined to one general location for an entire day (and they all need to eat). If it’s a private campus, robot companies can sidestep city regulations required to operate on public streets (since, you know, a robot might catch fire). Additionally, for something like a college campus, you can train an entire generation of consumers to use on-demand robot delivery, which they will then presumably still want as they head off into the real world.

We predicted that robots were going to be a big thing this year, and Starship is certainly kicking things off with a robotic bang. If you want to know more about where autonomous delivery is headed, join us at Articulate, our one-day food robot and automation conference on April 16 in San Francisco!