Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Delivery.com

Delivery.com Acquires Mr. Delivery to Expand Restaurant Delivery Services

NYC-based online platform delivery.com announced today that it has acquired Austin, TX-based Mr. Delivery. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This marks the sixth acquisition for delivery.com, whose platform connects customers to local retailers and restaurants to facilitate and the order and processing of goods and services. Sat in an NYC subway car at any point in the last five years? They’re frequently plastered with delivery.com ads listing all the different goods the platform can connect you with: restaurant food, groceries, booze, laundry services, etc.

Though its home is in the Big Apple, delivery.com is starting to expand across the rest of the country, with a current roster of cities that includes major metropolises Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., as well as a handful of mid-sized cities, most of them on the East Coast.

The acquisition of Mr. Delivery sees delivery.com expanding beyond those markets and upping its capabilities around restaurant food delivery. According to a press release, the acquisition will have Delivery.com expanding food delivery into Mr. Delivery’s current 160 cities, giving delivery.com a total presence in 38 states and over 1,800 U.S. cities, with more to come in the future. Meanwhile, Mr. Delivery will assume the delivery.com brand and technologies immediately. Delivery.com said in the press release it hopes to add other services, like grocery and laundry, to Mr. Delivery cities in the near future.

Restaurants who currently work with Mr. Delivery will get access to delivery.com’s order confirmation tools, business analytics, and partner integrations, among other things. In return, delivery.com gets access to last-mile delivery capabilities, as it will have use of Mr. Delivery’s network of drivers. This is the first time in its history delivery.com will actually be able to actually deliver the goods to customers; previously, the platform merely facilitated online orders and payments, leaving the last mile to the merchant.

But it’s a crowded market for both restaurant and grocery services. Between third-party delivery services’ push to mid-sized markets and companies like Walmart and Instacart bringing grocery delivery to every corner of the country, there’s increasingly less room for other players.

Delivery.com’s claim to fame has always been about serving the local business community and connecting customers to neighborhood stores and eateries. This, too, has always been Mr. Delivery’s credo when it comes to restaurant food delivery. Now we have to see if that focus on local is enough to help these companies stand out as they expand.

Phrame and Delivery.com Partner for In-Trunk Delivery

Is your car trunk the new post office box? It could be if a new service from Phrame and Delivery.com catches on. The two companies announced today the conclusion of a successful pilot that saw deliveries made directly into car trunks in an attempt to provide a new method of convenience for grocery shoppers.

Billing itself as the world’s first smart license plate frame, Phrame is a physical device that turns your license plate holder into a “military grade” secure lockbox where you can store your keys. Using the accompanying mobile app, you unlock the box and retrieve your keys. And just like smart locks for your home, you can also grant temporary access to your Phrame to a third party, like a delivery person. In the pilot program with Delivery.com, delivery staff accessed a customer’s car trunk via the Phrame app and successfully placed laundry inside the car.

According to the press announcement, the Phrame app notifies the car owner when the delivery is happening. Delivery drivers have 90 seconds to make the drop off and return the keys inside the Phrame (presumably an alarm will go off otherwise).

While the pilot between the two companies was for clean clothes, Delivery.com also provides delivery of food, alcohol and other home goods.

The battle between grocery giants like Kroger, Walmart and Amazon/Whole Foods to get you your groceries fast is heating up throughout multiple fronts. Two-hour delivery is table stakes for any grocer, so a lot of innovation happening to provide greater levels of convenience for customers. Kroger has started using self-driving delivery cars, Walmart is building out robot fulfillment centers for expanded drive-through pickup, and Amazon Key is a service that lets delivery drivers drop off packages inside your house when you’re away.

If the thought of a stranger going into your house while you’re gone creeps you out — you’re not alone, which is what makes in-trunk delivery such a potentially tantalizing delivery alternative. In-trunk delivery would let you receive packages while you are parked at work (or potentially anywhere else, depending on the delivery window). But in-trunk would also be useful when the car is parked at home. Not only could you have packages delivered while you’re away without letting anyone into your home, but packages could also be delivered while you are at home without interruption to your work or a baby sleeping. Amazon itself launched an in-trunk delivery program earlier this year through a partnership with GM and Volvo.

Phrame didn’t mention any further partnerships or pilot programs at this time, but it’s definitely a trend worth following to see if people will transform their personal space into a mobile post office.

Is Facebook’s New Food Ordering A Giant Misstep?

In Facebook’s attempt to keep the users on the site more than the average of 50 minutes per day, the company has added food ordering to its roster of activities. So, now, in addition to playing games, pinging your elementary school friends and sharing your Kickstarter faves, you can click and order food from local restaurants.

The feature, recently added to Facebook’s mobile and webtop sites, is basic in its operation. Depending on security settings, the “Order Food” option on the menu (marked with a hamburger emoji) will either populate nearby establishments or allow you to search based on location. A story in TechCrunch reports the new service will be powered by Delivery.com and Slice.

Rather than making a big splash with the announcement, Facebook mentioned food ordering in an October 2016 release. The news was lumped in with other planned capabilities, such as requesting appointments, buying movie tickets and getting quotes from local businesses. In short, it’s the concept of throwing ideas against a wall and seeing what will stick.

Because of Facebook’s reach and market clout, this new capability may be considered a threat to established player such as GrubHub (whose stock took an immediate hit).  In reality, that notion of immediate impact on competitors is an overreach. While Facebook’s new Order Food capability has yet to fully mature, it does not appear to be incorporated into user feeds which would make it far more immediate and powerful. As currently deployed, the feature is not an impulse play like the many sponsored posts that appear in Facebook member feeds. Facebook hopes its habitual users will simply add food delivery to their existing list of activities as they go through their day.

More than anything, Facebook’s entry into the restaurant delivery space shines a light on one of the company’s more glaring weaknesses—its lack of a viable commerce infrastructure. On the other hand, Amazon’s new restaurant delivery service takes on all the workload from the restaurants it serves. And, by the way, Amazon has its own fleet of drivers to deliver food while Facebook is in the background with others doing the heavy lifting.

Facebook’s strategy of looking for ways to keep its users on the site longer is a throwback to the early days of web portals such as Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek and even AOL. Those stalwarts had one or two prime draws—generally search and email—that kept folks coming back several times a day. Each of these—now mostly dormant—websites began to add new functionality which eventually made them so cluttered that they collapsed under the weight of their vision. It also is one of the reasons that Google was able to come in and eradicate the competition—it did one thing (search) and did it better than anyone else.

In the volatile world of food delivery, the winners will be those who offer restaurants a total, easy-to-use platform that allows them to focus on food, while partners such as GrubHub, UberEats, Amazon, Postmates and others take on the heavy lifting. Will Facebook be a player in this food fight? Probably not.