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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

delivery

Walmart Ditches $35 Minimum for Express Delivery

Walmart announced today that it is dropping the $35 minimum order requirement for its Express delivery service. The move comes during a time of record-breaking online grocery shopping and increased competition among retailers to grab consumer dollars.

Walmart launched its two-hour Express delivery service last May, during the height of the first wave of the pandemic. The speedy delivery lets customers order groceries, staples, electronics and more, and costs an additional $10 on top of the existing delivery charge (Walmart+ subscribers pay just the $10 Express fee).

This is the second time Walmart has waived a $35 minimum order. In December, Walmart removed the $35 minimum for Walmart.com orders for its Walmart+ subscribers, though that didn’t apply to groceries until today.

We’re a year into the pandemic, and while there are vaccines being deployed, online grocery is expected to remain sticky with consumers. Brick Meets Click estimated that online grocery hit $9.3 billion in sales during the month of January, with nearly 70 million households placing an average of 2.8 orders across delivery, pickup and ship-to-home categories.

Walmart’s removal of the minimum order for Express delivery is most directly a shot at Amazon, which offers free two-hour delivery for its Prime members (there’s a $4.99 fee if the order is less than $35). The two companies are locked in a pretty heated battle to win your grocery business. Walmart has been going after Amazon in the digital realm with the Walmart+ membership service that it launched last September, and Amazon has been expanding into the physical world with its line of real world Fresh grocery stores.

Though Walmart has vastly more retail locations than Amazon, Walmart+ has far fewer subscribers. One estimate has Walmart+ at roughly 8 million subscribers, while Amazon has an estimated 126 million Prime members in the U.S. Though to be fair, Walmart+ is only five months old, compared with the more than 15 years Prime has been around.

Today’s minimum order waiving it just the latest move by Walmart to grab a bigger chunk of our grocery e-commerce . In January, the company announced that it was deploying automated fulfillment centers to dozens of its stores to speed up order processing. The retailer is also testing out smart lockers for home delivery, grocery delivery via autonomous cars, and even delivery by drone.

Walmart’s Express delivery is available at roughly 3,000 stores, which, the company says, reaches nearly 70 percent of the population.

Domino’s: ‘In 60 Years, We’ve Never Made a Dollar Delivering Pizza’

Pizza chain Domino’s announced its fourth-quarter 2020 earnings this week and simultaneously reiterated its stance on using third-party delivery services like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub.

Short answer: It won’t.

Speaking on an earnings call Thursday, Domino’s CEO Ritch Allison said his company has struggled to understand “the long-term economics in some of the aggregator business.”

“Every time we look at it here in the U.S., it just doesn’t make sense for us or our franchisees economically,” he said. “And if it doesn’t make sense economically, it certainly doesn’t make sense to take the risk of sharing all of our customer data with these third parties.”

Domino’s has never used nor planned to use third-party delivery apps to serve its customers, choosing instead to process digital orders through its in-house app and use its own employees to handle the last mile. Allison told the Wall Street Journal in 2019 that “the profit hit and reputational risk” of working with DoorDash et al. wasn’t worth the extra revenue that might come from such partnerships.

One pandemic and an industry-wide shift to delivery later, and Domino’s hasn’t changed its stance.

“In 60 years, we’ve never made a dollar delivering pizza,” he said. “We make money on the product, but we don’t make money on the delivery. So we’re just not sure how others do it.”

Allison went on to explain that third-party delivery services’ money has to come from either the restaurant or the customer. Both of those areas are problematic right now. The high commission fees these services charge restaurants is a well-documented and increasingly hated practice. At the same time, services have hiked prices for customers, and when restaurant dining rooms finally get to reopen, it’s uncertain how popular delivery will remain among consumers.

DoorDash as good as admitted this in its own earnings call this week, saying it expects “declines in customer engagement and average order values” as markets open back up. The company beat analyst expectations for revenue during the fourth quarter, but also more than doubled its losses. 

Those points underscore Allison’s hesitations around making money via delivery. Domino’s appears to be moving in the opposite direction. On this week’s call, Allison said the company was shrinking its delivery area “to get closer to our customer for better service.” This fortressing strategy, as Domino’s calls it, will continue to drive store growth in 2021.

Same-store sales for Dominos grew 11.2 percent during the fourth quarter. In addition to keeping its delivery business in-house, the chain will focus on its carryout service, including its recently launched “carside service,” and making investments in new technologies. 

Instacart and Walgreens Launching Same Day Delivery Nationwide

Drug store chain Walgreens announced today that it is partnering with Instacart to roll out same-day delivery service across the U.S.

According to the announcement, tens of thousands of Walgreen’s items are now available for delivery via Instacart across Illinois, with the program set to expand nationwide to roughly 8,000 stores over the coming weeks. Instacart will deliver groceries, over-the-counter medications, health and wellness products, household essentials, convenience products and more in as little as one hour.

After the partnership launch in Illinois, Instacart delivery will expand to markets such as Southeast Florida, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington D.C., New York City and more. The delivery partnership will be across all 50 states throughout the spring.

This isn’t the first delivery partnership for Walgreens. Last year the drug store company partnered with DoorDash for delivery in select U.S. cities and expanded its partnership with Postmates nationwide. Both of those announcements came during or shortly after the first major wave of the COVID-19 pandemic here in the U.S. Around that time, with people in various states of lockdown and social distance across the country, grocery e-commerce skyrocketed.

Buying food online has remained sticky with consumers in the U.S. throughout the different waves of the pandemic. The most recent market survey from Brick Meets Click showed that in January 2021, 70 million U.S. households placed an average of 2.8 grocery orders online for pickup, delivery and ship-to-home orders.

Consumers have now spent just about a year under the thumb of the pandemic and new habits have definitely formed around how we get our food and other goods. Delivery is no longer a nice to have, it’s table stakes for any household good-related retailer.

Restaurant Tech Company Olo Files to Go Public

Restaurant SaaS platform Olo filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC late Friday and hopes to raise $100 million in an initial public offering. A representative for Olo confirmed this news to The Spoon today.

Olo is best known for its software platform that consolidates digital orders coming from different channels (web, kiosk, mobile, etc.) into a single ticket stream for the restaurant. Founded in 2005 in NYC, It was one of the original companies to help restaurants eradicate the so-called “tablet hell” scenario for restaurants. Prior to companies like Olo, staffers would have to manually input information from, say, the tablet processing Grubhub orders into the restaurant’s main POS system. 

The company has added its Dispatch service, which helps restaurants process delivery orders from their own websites and mobile apps. Another service, Rails, helps restaurants manage their relationships with third-party delivery providers, including negotiating a restaurant’s preferred providers and pricing strategy.

“Consumers today expect more on-demand convenience and personalization from restaurants, particularly through digital channels, but many restaurants lack the in-house infrastructure and expertise to satisfy this increasing demand in a cost-effective manner,” states the S-1 filing. “Our platform and application programming interfaces, or APIs, seamlessly integrate with a wide range of solutions, unifying disparate technologies across the restaurant ecosystem.” 

The Olo platform is specifically suited to restaurant brands with multiple locations. Among the companies customers are Five Guys, Wing Stop, Shake Shack, Denny’s, The Cheesecake Factory, Jamba Juice, Dairy Queen, and many others well-known names in the restaurant biz.

The COVID-19 pandemic, of course, has only heightened the urgency for restaurants to organize their off-premises orders (takeout, delivery, drive-thru, etc.) to increase the speed and efficiency at which those can be fulfilled. Olo said in its S-1 filing that in response, the company “reprioritized” its strategic roadmap “to address the most important solutions for [its] customers.” Notably, that has included takeout and curbside options.

Currently, Olo works with about 64,000 individual restaurant units across 400 brands. In its filing, Olo said it processed $14.6 billion in gross merchandise value in 2020.

This is the second major piece of news around restaurant tech IPOs today. Earlier this morning, the Wall Street Journal noted that restaurant-management platform Toast could go public in 2021 with a $20 billion valuation. 

For Olo, no price or timeline has been set as of right now.     

Foxtrot Market Raises $42 Million for Its Corner Store and One-Hour Delivery

Corner store and café chain Foxtrot Market announced today that it has raised a $42 million Series B round of funding. Alamanac Insights and Monogram Capital Partners led the round with participation from David Chang, Imaginary Ventures, Wittington Ventures, Fifth Wall, Lerer Hippeau, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, M3 Ventures, The University of Chicago, Collaborative Fund, Wasson Enterprise, Bluestein Ventures, and Barshop Ventures.

Foxtrot launched in 2014 and in addition to being an “upscale” corner store, the business has app-based purchasing and makes its entire inventory available for delivery in under one hour. According to today’s press announcement, last year company sales increased more than 100 percent year-over-year.

On its website, Foxtrot currently lists 10 open locations across Chicago, IL and Dallas, TX, with two more coming to the Washington, D.C. area. With its new funding, Foxtrot said it expects to double its store count by the end of the year, adding as many as nine stores in Chicago and Dallas, along with further expansion into D.C. The new money will also go towards expanding its line of private label packaged goods and gifts, and further investment in its nationwide shipping.

As mundane as they may be in our everyday lives, the convenience store is going through a bit of a renaissance right now. DoorDash is not only delivering from convenience stores, but also building out its own line of delivery-only convenience stores. Also, more convenience stores are adopting new technology like cashierless checkout, thanks to startups like AiFi, Grabango and Zippin.

Foxtrot is also part of another trend we’re seeing at The Spoon: investment in speedy delivery. Over in Europe, both Weezy in the U.K. and Gorillas in Germany got funding in the past few months for their fast, corner store-like deliveries. Here in the U.S., GoPuff bought BevMo to expand its sub-30 minute delivery network.

The pandemic accelerated our need for delivery, and it looks like convenience and corner stores are definitely stepping up to deliver.

College: the Next Big Frontier for Ghost Kitchens

New bits over the last couple weeks have sent my brain right back to college — specifically to the college dining hall, where myself and others (everyone) used to steal food to take back to our dorms to eat between meals.

OK, I’m not sure that actually classified as stealing, since we were all on prepaid meal plans. But you weren’t allowed to take food out of the dining room, so the act of sneaking, say, a couple oranges and a jumbo ziploc bag of cereal out the door was practically an art form among the student body population.

Gen Z will likely not have to jump through that particular hoop when it comes to getting fed in between regular mealtimes. I was recently reminded of this possibility when news dropped that foodservice provider Chartwells plans to launch a ghost kitchen program across the colleges and universities it supplies.   

Chartwells has already piloted the program at a few schools, including the University of Utah and Seattle University. The idea is to find underutilized kitchen spaces on campus and turn them into ghost kitchens that serve students delivery and pickup meals ordered via the Chartwell’s mobile app.

While the long-term relevance of ghost kitchens is still a hotly debated topic in the the wider restaurant industry, the format seems to be a no-brainer for school campuses. 

As my food-theft story above anecdotally illustrates, students eat at all hours of the day and night, and often those weird hours are out of necessity (e.g., studying late, extracurricular commitments, etc.) Campus dining halls rarely accommodate those hours. Nowadays that leaves students at the mercy of DoorDash or Uber Eats, which, particularly with the newly hiked fees, gets expensive quickly. There’s always, of course, the option to hop in the car and hit the drive-thru, but that takes time and, depending on the restaurant, costs a fair amount of money, too.

Instead of leaving students to the mercy of surrounding restaurants, schools have an opportunity to work with their foodservice providers and offer meals in a wider variety of formats at more times throughout the day and night. The kitchen infrastructure already exists, most notably at dining halls that only operate at specific hours. Those spaces could easily double as kitchens that fulfill pickup and/or delivery orders in the off hours. Schools might even make money off such an operation. 

Meals, meanwhile, could count towards a student’s overall meal plan, and adding a mobile app component, as Chartwells has done, would simplify the entire process. Another approach would be for a school foodservice provider to partner with a third-party mobile app company, as Aramark did with Good Uncle in 2019. Via the Good Uncle app, students at participating schools can browse meals and order them for delivery. The app’s “Flexcash” system is a declining balance that can be re-upped by the student (or their parent) at any time. From there, it functions just as a meal card for the dining hall would.

Food robots, of the small, six-wheeled variety, could also prove themselves a valuable part of the campus ghost kitchen operation. Companies like Starship and Kiwibot can already be found roving about multiple university campuses. In fact, both companies have existing partnerships with yet-another foodservice provider, Sodexo. One can easily imagine one of these roving bots carrying food from an on-campus ghost kitchen to the student’s dormitory or to a centralized pickup point on campus.

A final point in favor of ghost kitchens on campus. We hear often that delivery and takeout can’t replace the restaurant experience, which is true, because eating soggy fries from a cardboard box is decidedly not an experience. But campus dining halls aren’t exactly known for five-star meals, and much of the food served up in these places is already well-suited to travel. There may even be room for improvements in menu offerings, something Chartwells appears to be looking at through its program.

Does all this potential for ghost kitchens, tech, and the like spell the death of the campus dining room? Not likely. In fact, this particular on-premises format is ripe for its own digital reinvention, from automat-style lockers to robot vending machines and even tools in the back of house that can better monitor food safety and food waste. All said and done, there’s arguably enough room for innovation within format as there is beyond it.

Food Tech ‘Round the Web

Meanwhile, over in the regular restaurant world, ghost kitchens are not the future, according to this thoughtful analysis from Grubstreet writer Rachel Sugar.

Also, forget Guy Fieri. White Castle is opening a delivery-only kitchen in downtown Orlando, Florida, which will be in operation next week.

And if you read nothing else in this newsletter, check Eater’s comprehensive coverage on how to help feed those impacted by the Texas winter storms.

Campus Foodservice Giant Chartwells Brings Ghost Kitchens to Colleges and Universities

Chartwells Higher Education, a foodservice management company, announced today it has launched its ghost kitchen program for college and university campuses. Chartwells has already piloted the program at a handful of schools, including Seattle University, SUNY Buffalo State College, the University of Utah, the University of Texas at Dallas, and San Jose State University.

Working with these schools, Chartwells developed several new meal concepts appropriate for delivery. For example, the company worked with Seattle University to open a ghost kitchen that tested 12 rotating entrees and desserts, which students could order via the existing Chartwells mobile app. Since most of Seattle University’s physical campus was closed during Fall semester 2020, the ghost kitchen pilot also served as a test for how colleges and universities can provide students with food even when dining halls are shuttered. Meals were available for both delivery and contactless pickup.

Chartwells said more than 24,000 orders were placed via its mobile app within the first month of the Seattle University test. Terry Conaty, Resident District Manager at Seattle University, said in a press release that the partnership was a “win-win” because it provided students with “lots of new menu options without having to add additional personnel resources or compromise our social distancing guidelines.”

Chartwells serves more than 300 campuses. The company says this ghost kitchen program will add to rather than replace existing dining options. The idea is to take advantage of any underutilized kitchen space on campuses that can be turned into ghost kitchens.

Historically, few would have called college and university campuses hotbeds for food tech innovation. That has slowly started to change over the last few years with the rise of apps like MealMe and Good Uncle (the latter of which was acquired by foodservice giant Aramark), the presence of delivery bots on campus, and Gen Z’s inherent familiarity with a more tech-driven eating experience. 

Nor is Chartwells the only company bringing ghost kitchens to campus. Last month, hospitality platform C3 joined forces with Graduate Hotels to put more ghost kitchens in college towns. 

The ghost kitchen format is an obvious fit for the college and university market. Students eat meals at all hours of the day and night, a schedule the traditional dining room’s hours don’t typically accommodate. And on the note of dining rooms, there’s no telling whether the traditional cafeteria-style setup will exist once classes shift back to the physical campus. Social distancing will have to be considered when it comes to those spaces, and some students may not feel safe eating in a dining room. Colleges and universities will have to provide alternative options, including pickup and delivery.

Schools, too, are brimming with underutilized kitchen space. For smaller campuses, a few would suffice when it comes to serving the entire student body. For larger schools, one can imagine a network of ghost kitchens placed strategically around the campus, each serving different sets of dormitories and apartment blocks. Meals ordered from campus ghost kitchens could even count as part of a student’s meal plan, which would be considerably cheaper than someone having to order from DoorDash every night.

When schools go back in session very much depends on each individual institution. Many are doing hybrid online-offline sessions right now. The many new food options for students seem geared towards both accommodating these fluctuating schedules and a bid by schools to keep pace with the changing times for foodservice. 

MealMe’s App That Compares Food Delivery Services Is Set to Expand Across College Campuses

MealMe, a company known for its app that aggregates and compares all the major restaurant delivery apps, is headed to the college market. It will soon launch at Syracuse University and is currently available at Indiana University. 

The MealMe app, which the company calls “search engine for food delivery,” compares the various delivery apps like Grubhub and Postmates as well as some smaller, more regional services. Upon opening the app, users can search for a restaurant or food type and compare pricing, delivery times, and other elements across the different services.

The app aims to streamline the process of comparing pricing, wait times, and other elements across the different delivery apps, and to connect users with the best deals in their area. In the last year, the MealMe team has also added a checkout function to their app, so that a user doesn’t actually have to leave the MealMe interface to order from, say Grubhub.

That said, MealMe is strictly an aggregator and does not charge people for use of the app, although users can add a “MealMe” tip to their order. The company has deals with the major third-party delivery providers.

The app originally launched in 2016 as a kind of social network for food. The idea struggled to gain much traction, and MealMe reinvented itself in March of 2020 right after the pandemic struck the U.S. and subsequently forced restaurants to shift to delivery and takeout orders. That same year, the company was accepted to the TechStars Atlanta accelerator program.

While the MealMe app is running across the country, the college market is an area the company’s founders are specifically targeting. It launched at George Washington University in January, and has since added Syracuse and Indiana Universities to its roster. “Although we are live, technically, we want to form relationships with individuals at every university and do a hard launch at every school so that people know about MealMe,” MealMe president Matthew Bouchner told Syracuse-centric news site The Daily Orange.

MealMe joins a number of companies developing different ways to bring more food delivery to the college and university sector. Recently, hospitality platform C3 announced a deal with Graduate Hotels to bring virtual food halls to many a college town across the U.S. Starship, maker of the autonomous six-wheeled rover bot, has been delivering food to students for a couple years now. Even legacy players are involved, the best example being Aramark and its 2019 acquisition of order-ahead app Good Uncle.

College campuses have long been an important market for the food delivery sector. Having a presence at a university means potential exposure to tens of thousands of people from the student body population. Additionally, the major delivery services already deliver to college campuses, so MealMe’s new audiences will most likely already be used to getting their meals via digital- and delivery-centric channels. 

Uber Q4: Delivery Up 150% Year-Over-Year as It Expands Beyond Restaurants

Uber unveiled its earnings this week for the fourth quarter of 2020. Its food delivery business remains the strongest part of the business, a point hardly surprising since we’re still in the midst of a pandemic and restaurant dining rooms remain closed in many places.

A few of the latest stats, according to the company earnings call yesterday, include:

  • Uber reported $3.17 billion in total revenue from October through December, 2020.
  • Q4 gross bookings for delivery grew 128 percent and reached a $44 billion run rate in December.
  • Revenue “more than tripled” from last year and grew 19 percent compared to the third quarter of 2020.

On this week’s call, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi also called out Uber’s plans to expand delivery into areas beyond traditional restaurants. “It’s become clear that the pandemic has increased consumers’ appetite for on-demand delivery of not just food, but all goods, and we take a major step to address this enormous opportunity,” he said.

Recent(ish) acquisitions by Uber support that statement. At the end of 2019, the company acquired majority ownership of online grocery Cornershop and in 2020 expanded its grocery delivery services. Uber’s more recent $2.65 billion acquisition of rival service Postmates gives it access to the latter’s delivery-as-a-service business that connects customers with Walmart, 7-Eleven, Apple, and other stores. Just last week, Uber also nabbed alcohol-delivery service Drizly.  

“These new initiatives will remain an investment priority going forward,” Khosrowshahi said on the call.

Overall, Uber’s losses are narrowing. For all of 2020, net losses totaled $6.77 billion, which is a roughly 20 percent improvement from the $8.51 billion in 2019.

Flipdish Raises €40M to Help Restaurants Process Digital Orders In House

Flipdish announced that it has raised €40 million (~$48.5 million USD) from Tiger Global Management to expand its software platform that lets restaurants create their own branded digital properties instead of having to rely on third-party platforms for online orders.

The company said today in a blog post that it will use the new funds to build out its team, expand operationally, and improve services to its existing customers. Currently, the service operates in the UK, Germany, France, Ireland, Spain, and the U.S. 

Flipdish’s promise to restaurants is that its software will help them easily set up and manage digital properties in order to bring digital ordering in-house, rather than leaving it to third-party marketplaces like Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Restaurants using software can build a website and mobile app that features their own branding but is powered by Flipdish’s technology on the back end. The system also includes built-in marketing and analytics tools. 

It does not, however, appear to completely eliminate reliance on third-party delivery providers. Instead, restaurants can process orders through their own (Flipdish-powered) apps and website, and Flipdish then partners with “a number of food delivery service providers” to power the last mile. Many of those are smaller, regional on-demand delivery services, though DoorDash’s Drive service makes an appearance. 

This hybrid approach isn’t unusual in the restaurant tech space. Few companies actually provide their own driver fleet along with their software stack to restaurants, ShiftPixy being the notable exception. Others, including Lunchbox, Orderslip, and Toast, integrate with some of the major third-party platforms in order to fulfill that last mile. That particular setup is unlikely to change soon, since few have the money to actually maintain a national (or international) driver fleet.

Flipdish, at least from its messaging, seems to understand that. The company noted in today’s blog post that its system isn’t just about addressing “the huge commissions taken by those marketplaces – although that is certainly part of it. It’s also about enabling those businesses to build a closer relationship with their customers.”

To date, the company has raised a total of €47.5 million, or roughly $58 million USD.

Ordrslip Announces Integration With DoorDash for Restaurant Delivery

Restaurant tech company Ordrslip this week announced a partnership with DoorDash’s white label fulfillment platform, DoorDash Drive. Through the partnership, restaurants with mobile-order platforms powered by Ordrslip’s technology can use the DoorDash network to fulfill delivery orders.

Ordrslip’s pitch to restaurants is that the company’s technology allows businesses to create their own branded mobile apps without having to invest the millions of dollars and countless hours typically required to create sophisticated order-and-pay apps from scratch.

From the restaurant customer’s perspective, the app looks and functions as if it were completely owned and powered by the restaurant. On the back end, the Ordrslip SaaS system powers each transaction, and provides features such as order-ahead and payment capabilities, POS integration (with Clover or Square), order tracking, and, of course, delivery integration.

Ordrslip announced a similar partnership with Postmates (now a part of Uber) in 2020.

Giving restaurants the ability to process transactions in-house has become an increasingly important topic since the start of the industry-wide shift to digital. Doing so lets businesses pay less in commission fees to third-party delivery services. It should be noted, however, that some commission fee is still required on orders that utilize DoorDash or Postmates for the last mile of delivery. Other systems, such as those of Toast and Ritual, offer similar packages. For a restaurant to entirely bypass a commission fee on delivery orders, they would have to conduct delivery via a service like ShiftPixy, which provides drivers in addition to powering restaurants’ digital properties.

Restaurants that do large volumes of takeout orders would benefit from a technology like Ordrslip’s, since a third-party service like DoorDash is not involved in the process. However, said third-party services appear to be getting hip to this idea: just this week, Uber Eats announced it is waiving the commission fee for pickup orders through June 30, 2021. Doubtless the battle over who owns the takeout/pickup order process is just heating up.

Ordrslip licenses its tech to restaurants for a flat $100/month fee and is available to restaurants across the entire U.S. 

Uber Eats Launches Campaign to Support Independent Restaurants

Uber today announced Eat Local, a campaign the company says will support independent restaurants financially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As part of the Eat Local package, Uber will donate $4.5 million to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which will in turn distribute financial assistance to U.S. restaurants facing COVID-19-related challenges. Restaurants must be on the Uber Eats and/or Postmates platforms to be eligible. 

According to the LISC website, the applications process for grants opens on Feb. 16. The grant program will offer to help restaurants meet certain expenses, such as payroll, rent, utilities, outstanding debts to vendors, and upgrading technology systems. 

Restaurants must have been active on Uber Eats or Postmates since Jan. 1, 2021 in order to be eligible for the grant. Businesses must also have less than five locations and not be affiliated with a national brand. (The full list of eligibility requirements is on LISC’s site.)

In keeping with earlier relief efforts from 2020, Uber’s Eat Local package also includes waived and reduced fees for restaurants around restaurant pickup orders and for orders placed via a restaurant’s own website but delivered by Uber Eats. Restaurants can get daily payouts instead of the standard weekly ones, and Uber will also continue matching donations made by customers via the Eats app’s Restaurant Contribution feature.

Uber (and newly acquired Postmates) along with Grubhub and DoorDash first began offering relief packages for restaurants back in March 2020, when shelter-in-place mandates first went into effect in the U.S. Since then, these services have launched various grant programs and assistance efforts, including Grubhub’s Winterization Grant and DoorDash’s ongoing Main Street Strong program.

All of these efforts go some ways towards helping small and independent restaurants, which have been most damaged by the pandemic. What remains unclear is how much grants and relief efforts help when stacked up against the high commission fees third-party delivery service continue to charge these smaller restaurants. That factor remains likely to be a point of heated debate long after the worst parts of the pandemic have subsided.