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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Al Fresco Vs. To Go

Outdoor dining: an opportunity to innovate or a yet-another huge expense for restaurants? The whole restaurant industry is pondering this question as we head into fall and start prepping for winter.

I wonder if restaurants might not be better off forgoing the whole debate and instead keeping their focus fixed on their off-premises strategies.

In many cities, restaurants have relied heavily on outdoor seating at a time when dining rooms remain shuttered or can legally only accommodate a fraction of their normal capacity. Some businesses have gotten very creative in their efforts. And that creativity will need to carry them through the next several months of cold, snow, and wintery mixes, when normally no customer would even consider dining al fresco. There’s no telling when dining rooms will be able to operate in full capacity again, and with reports of rising COVID-19 cases, there’s also no way to predict if we’ll have to shut them down completely again.

In response to the uncertainty, some cities are getting proactive about winterizing the outdoor dining experience. The idea is to reinvent the outdoor seating format to make it more comfortable for restaurants-goers to eat outside, despite the weather. This week, Washington D.C.’s Office of Nightlife and Culture announced a $4 million grant program to help restaurants cover the cost of tents, domes, heaters, furnishings and other operational expenses that specifically relate to outdoor dining. Applicants must submit a budget of their planned expenses before they can receive funds. All locally owned businesses may apply, with a few caveats. (Read the full requirements here.)

The grant program follows recent news of Chicago’s Winter Design Challenge, which was accepting ideas for outdoor dining formats and will announce the winners in a few days. Submissions so far have included tents, solar-powered pergolas, heat-reflecting walls, heated tables, and igloos, among other gems.

All of those ideas sound compelling (including the igloo). None are likely to be cheap, which gets to the real issue of winterizing outdoor dining. It’s less a question of whether these solutions would work as it is of how much more money a restaurant would have to pay in order to implement them? That’s to say nothing of the fact that restaurants must first obtain sidewalk cafe permits to even be allowed to serve outside, which is yet-another expense piled on the heaters, furniture, and other creations meant to protect diners from the weather.

I need hardly say that restaurants can ill afford these options at a time when many are struggling to simply keep the lights on. Off-premises formats are not ideal, but they are going to be a better long-term bet for most businesses. For one thing, the numbers around digital ordering, which powers off-premises orders, say as much: 50 percent of consumers are using restaurant mobile apps “more often or much more often” than they were before the pandemic, according to one recent survey. Another found that its restaurant customers “have seen a 782.7% increase in Online Order sales volume growth.”

At the same time, 60 percent of restaurant operators say that their operational costs are higher now than pre-pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association, and that’s without heated tents or igloos.

As much as I hate to say it, forgoing the question of outdoor dining altogether and using any remaining funds and resources for improving to-go formats seems like the wiser decision. At least for now. Someone may come along with a truly disruptive idea that could reinvent outdoor dining without breaking the bank, but that’s a wish more than a reality right now.

A Fine-Dining Drive-Thru Extravaganza

Speaking of creative concepts. Reservations platform Resy this week unveiled plans for “The Resy Drive-Thru,” a fine-dining drive-thru event that takes place October 15 and 16 at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles. Resy is doing the event in partnership with Amex, which acquired the platform last year.

Ten noted Los Angeles restaurants will host pop-ups outside the Palladium. Guests will be able to drive through this “whimsical labyrinth,” which effectively amounts to a 10-course tasting dinner on wheels. Chefs include Nancy Silverton, Curtis Stone, Nyesha Arrington, Konbi, Night + Market, and Jon & Vinny’s, among others.

From a Resy press release: 

“Each of the chefs will create a never-before-seen dish from their individual kitchens, to be served in sequence to the guests, who will remain in cars for the duration of the experience.”  

I thought the whole thing faintly ridiculous (and pretentious) at first, until I remembered how badly the pandemic has hit the full-service and fine-dining sectors. No, a fine-dining drive-thru won’t solve all the restaurant industry’s current woes. Yes, the event is partially a way for Resy to promote its business. But it’s also another example of the industry being forced to think of new and unusual ways to connect with customers. And right now, we need as many of those as we can get.

Following the event, Resy and American Express will make a donation to chef Jose Andres’ nonprofit World Central Kitchen.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

Virtual restaurant company Triver Eats and Urge Gastropub & Common House San Marcos opened their first Taco Box virtual franchise this week in San Diego. The concept offers family-style taco bars available takeout or delivery.

Donatos vs. Dominos: Pizza chain Donatos told NRN this week that it operates “a secret innovation hub” near its Ohio HQ, where it tests new foodservice innovations it hopes will eventually benefit the entire food industry. So Domino’s is clearly not the only pizza company-turned tech innovator in town.

Read this: an extensive breakdown of the many ways in which third-party delivery services are decimating the restaurant industry.

 

Yummy Corporation Raises $12M to Expand Its Ghost Kitchen Network

Indonesia-based cloud kitchen management company Yummy Corporation has raised a $12 million Series B round of funding, according to a report from TechCrunch. The round was led by SoftBank Ventures Asia and included participation from new investors AppWorks, Coca Cola Amatil X, Palm Drive Capital, Quest Ventures, and Vectr Ventures. Also participating were existing investors Intudo Ventures and Sovereign’s Capital.

Founded in 2019, Yummy operates a network of fully managed delivery-only kitchens across Jakarta. It rents space to existing food and bev brands, providing them kitchen infrastructure as well as the necessary staff to assist in fulfilling delivery and takeout orders.

The company says it will use the new funds to expand into other cities and further develop its tech platform. 

Which cities Yummy next heads to is yet to be announced, but if they’re anywhere in Southeast Asia, the company will face plenty of competition. Food delivery service GrabFood already operates over 50 ghost kitchens across countries in the region, including Indonesia. Delivery service Gojek also has ghost kitchens in Indonesia and other countries in Southeast Asia and India. 

Earlier this year, Euromonitor said the global ghost kitchen market could be worth $1 trillion by 2030. That may be an absurdly optimistic number, but there’s no denying the popularity of the ghost kitchen particularly since the pandemic forced most of the world into lockdown and turned the traditional restaurant model on its head. In the last few months alone, we’ve seen numerous sizable fundraising rounds from ghost kitchen companies all over the world as well as more networks of virtual restaurants come to market.

Yummy Corporation raised a $7.8 million Series A round in 2019. This new round brings the company’s total funding to $19.8 million.

 

Zomato: India’s Food Delivery Nearing Pre-COVID Levels

The food delivery market in India has almost bounced back to pre-COVID levels. A recent blog post by Zomato stated that gross merchandise levels are roughly 85 percent of what they were pre-pandemic, up from 75 percent in August.

According to Zomato, major cities like Delhi and Mumbai are nearing full recovery, while others “have recovered completely and have exceeded pre-COVID levels.” Affluent parts of cities are driving the recovery, which makes sense given the cost of using third-party delivery services. Zomato said more high-end restaurants have also gone online, which accounts for some of the growth as well. “Overall spends on such premium restaurants have grown by over 25% over pre-COVID levels,” the company said.

Other influential factors include more at-home delivery orders for celebrations and more group orders, since everyone’s stuck at home with their families.

Of course, the caveat here is that Zomato has quite a bit of skin in this game, it being one of India’s leading food delivery services. So while the stats from this recent blog post only include Zomato’s customer base, they’re likely a fairly accurate gauge of the entire India food delivery market. (Swiggy is the only other major delivery player in India right now.)

Zomato this year also expanded its services to include groceries and household goods (a move that other third-party delivery services like DoorDash have done in other parts of the world.) The company also raised $162 million earlier this month and said it is preparing for an IPO in 2021.

Right now, Zomato’s main competitor for all this growth is Proses-backed Swiggy, which has raised $1.6 billion in funding to-date. Everything could change, though, depending on how successful Amazon is at scaling its newly launched food delivery business across the country. Neither Zomato nor Swiggy is profitable yet. Amazon, meanwhile, already has a presence in India through its Amazon Fresh and Amazon PrimeNow platforms. 

Ghost Kitchen, Meet the Automat

Inexplicably, I’ve always wished I could have experienced the Automat in its heyday. Created at the tail-end of the Nineteenth Century, Automats consisted of a wall of cubbies containing simple food and beverage items users could unlock for a nickel. It was essentially fast food before fast food existed.

Fast forward to 2020, and it looks like I may yet be able to experience the concept, albeit a higher-tech version of it.

As we chatted on this week during our Editor podcast, the Automat is making a comeback. That’s thanks to restaurant companies launching cubby systems that are equipped with temperature control functionality and that can be unlocked with a user’s own smartphone. Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is the latest to iterate on the old concept, following in the footsteps of Minnow, Brightloom (née Eatsa), and others.

The resurgence makes sense, given the restaurant industry’s sudden shift to off-premises formats and simpler foods that travel well. Which is why I can think of no better location for Automat 2.0 than outside a ghost kitchen.

One of the major selling points for ghost kitchens is that they allow restaurants to operate without incurring the costs of a front-of-house operation. The ghost kitchen as we know it is also specifically designed to serve off-premises formats. Up to now, that’s been primarily delivery, but the pandemic has generated so much interest in ghost kitchens that we’re now seeing different styles of the concept emerge, including those that offer pickup. Kitchen United lists both options on its website, as does DoorDash (for its DoorDash Kitchens facility). Having a pickup option means restaurants can still take advantage of the ghost kitchen format without necessarily coughing up the sky-high commission fees associated with delivery orders.

At the same time, the pandemic continues, and even if it were to magically disappear tomorrow, our heightened expectations around cleanliness and “contactless” restaurant experiences are here to stay. Which is to say, customers are going to want minimized human contact for restaurant transactions for a long time to come. 

It doesn’t get more minimized than the Automat. By way of a hypothetical example, imagine a virtual deli that has a kitchen space from which it fulfills online orders. It would fulfill delivery orders, but also maintain a cubby system outside to hold any pickup orders. Throw a few tables and chairs near the machine where those who want can eat onsite. Other than the smartphones and the digital ordering, the setup isn’t hugely different from the original Automat concept.

Of course, some ghost kitchen companies choose to locate their facilities in former warehouse districts that don’t get much foot traffic. But as we outlined in our recent Spoon Plus report on ghost kitchens, that’s the exception, rather than the norm right now. Most ghost kitchen operators will tell you location matters, and the closer you can locate one to customers, the better.

And actually, we’re already trekking towards this automat-in-a-ghost kitchen future. Besides the above examples, Starbucks launched its Express stores in 2019 that act as ghost kitchens for nearby locations and include a wall of pickup lockers onsite. Other fast food chains have whittled their dining room concepts down to more to-go-friendly formats, and many of these orders are now being fulfilled in ghost kitchens.  

Automats were originally a precursor to fast food. These days, it seems like fast food may yet prove to be the forerunner to Automat 2.0.

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Location-based Picnicking

You may remember a year or so ago when I wrote about Domino’s partnering with a company called what3words to delivery food to street corners, parks, and other non-traditional addresses. 

It seems what3words is at it again with food delivery, this time partnering with Honest Burgers in London to deliver to random swaths of grass in the city’s Clapham district.

What3words’ platform divides the entire world into 3m x 3m squares, which are GPS coordinates. An algorithm then converts the coordinates into three-word addresses to give each a unique (and often bizarre) name (see image above). With this technology, you could literally choose a random patch of a park sans any notable landmarks or other identifiable items and get your burger delivered to your exact location.

The program with Honest Burgers is only running for a few days and restricted to Clapham. But with more of the restaurant experience taking place outside the four walls of the business, a technology like this could become huge. That’s assuming the restaurant biz makes it through winter and and once more heads to outdoor spaces.

Cracker Barrel’s gone the ghost kitchen route. The company said at its earnings call this week that it plans to convert one of its locations in Indianapolis, Ind. to a ghost kitchen that will handle large-scale catering orders as well as some individual orders placed via third-party delivery services. The store will also be used to help fulfill delivery orders from other nearby Cracker Barrel locations during busy times, like the upcoming fall/winter holiday season.

Meanwhile, Shake Shack said this week it has expanded curbside pickup to 40 percent of its stores, and that roughly one third of all app orders are being placed for curbside. The company has plans to extend curbside to 50 of its locations by the end of September, and is also exploring the possibility of more drive-thrus and walk-up windows.

The New York City Council passed a bill that lets restaurants add a “COVID-19 surcharge” of up to 10 percent to a customer’s bill for up to 90 days after indoor dining reaches full capacity. In other words, for the foreseeable future. The bill is an attempt to help restaurants generate additional revenue as the struggle to keep the lights on continues.

Yelp: Permanent and Temporary Restaurant Closures Are Increasing

Roughly 61 percent of businesses listed as “closed” on Yelp have shuttered permanently, according to the platform’s latest Local Economic Impact report.

A total of 32,109 restaurants that were marked as open on the Yelp platform on March 1 are now closed, the new report details. Those numbers make the restaurant industry the most impacted by the pandemic of any business type on Yelp.

Those numbers, of course, only account for the restaurants listed on Yelp’s platform. The National Restaurant Association, which represents the entire restaurant industry, released its own findings this week that said 100,000 restaurants, or nearly one in six, are closed either permanently or for the long term. But whether you go by Yelp’s numbers or the Association’s more widespread findings, the conclusion is the same: the uptick in restaurant closures continues to rise.

As far as Yelp’s new data is concerned, restaurant closure rates vary across the country. As today’s report notes, “Bigger states and metros with higher rents and more stringent local operations for small businesses throughout the last six months have felt a greater toll.” Geographically speaking, California, Texas, Florida, and New York had the highest number of closures of states, while Los Angeles, NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, and Dallas topped the list for cities.

Types of restaurants with the most closures include breakfast/brunch spots, burger joints, sandwich shops, dessert places and Mexican restaurants.

Yelp’s report wasn’t all gloomy news, though. It also noted that some restaurants have been able to maintain low closure rates. Not surprisingly, those are the restaurants focusing on delivery and takeout, offering food that travels well. While a small silver lining, that point suggests the work restaurants have been doing for the last six months to shift their strategies towards more to-go-friendly formats is not in vain.

Yelp’s new report, along with the Association’s figures, both come just days after the the CDC released findings that suggest those who eat in restaurant dining rooms are twice as likely to be at risk for COVID-19.

Instacart Enters Convenience Category, Now Delivers from 7-Eleven

Good news for those craving a Slurpee, but don’t want to leave their homes: Instacart announced today that it is now offering same-day delivery from national convenience store chain 7-Eleven.

The service is available from more than 750 7-Eleven stores in Texas, Florida, Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C., with a national rollout to more than 7,000 stores to follow. Instacart will offer delivery of thousands of convenience store items including grocery, alcohol, over-the-counter meds and presumably a hot dog that’s been on hot rollers.

Customers in the current service area can start shopping from 7-Eleven today by visiting www.instacart.com/711 or using the Instacart mobile app. Just as with its grocery service, an Instacart Shopper will go to the store, pick out the order and deliver it. Deliveries can also be scheduled.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a surge of interest in Instacart’s delivery service. The company said that since March it has expanded with more than 130 retailers to add roughly 6,500 new stores to the Instacart platform.

This partnership with 7-Eleven is Instacart’s first foray into the convenience category, and in a way foreshadows the looming battles ahead as third party delivery services expand. DoorDash, another third-party delivery service, has made multiple moves into the convenience category throughout the year, including partnerships with Circle K, WaWa and… 7-Eleven. All of these efforts recently culminated with DoorDash opening up its own ghost convenience store chain in select cities.

If Instacart and DoorDash duking it out to bring you a Big Gulp doesn’t blur the lines enough for you, there’s the fact that DoorDash is now getting into grocery delivery. Uber Eats, another third-party delivery player is also starting to offer grocery delivery.

It’s understandable that we’re headed for a big delivery battle royale across multiple store categories. Restaurants, which were the bread and butter for services like DoorDash and Uber Eats, have been decimated by the pandemic. As a result, those services are on the hunt for new revenue opportunities, and with record amounts of e-commerce, grocery is a big juicy target.

While Instacart if firmly entrenched in the grocery space (Walmart recently added the company as a delivery partner), adding convenience stores can help broaden its defensive moat. Instacart doesn’t want to see DoorDash creep into more categories and have people get used to the idea of ordering more and different types of food delivery from them.

As these delivery services look to stake out more territory in their search for customers and revenue, we can expect to see similar category expansion announcements from all the delivery players in the coming months.

Uber Eats Launches a Paid Advertising Tool for Restaurants

Uber Eats launched a new paid advertising platform today that claims to be “helping restaurants reach more customers,” according to a company blog post. Thing is, it doesn’t seem like it will be all that helpful for the bulk of independent restaurants. And it may in fact be the opposite, at least for the ones who do delivery with Uber Eats.

Here are the basics: Through the new service, simply dubbed Sponsored Listings, Uber Eats restaurant clients can pay to have their business name appear at the top of the app in relevant user searches. Restaurants can set up a Sponsored campaign through their Uber Eats dashboard, designating the intended audience (e.g., “new customers”) and a weekly budget spend. Restaurants pay an amount each time a customer clicks on their ad. (It varies from one restaurant to the next.) They can also start and stop their campaigns any time. 

Uber Eats says that the program is available to both chain restaurants and independents. Which leads us back to the debate around whether or not this new service will be of any actual value to most restaurants. 

We’re at a time in the history of the restaurant biz when paying for advertising is not top priority for the majority of businesses — many of whom are struggling to even keep the lights on. With paper-thin margins made even thinner by the shutdowns and reduced capacity mandates, pay-per-click advertising, even if it’s just $50 per week, is not always possible. Independent restaurants already typically pay more than chains in commission fees on Uber Eats.

At the same time, many chain restaurants, especially major QSRs, have managed to weather the pandemic (and even thrive during it), thanks largely to their built-in to-go formats. It’s safe to argue these restaurants could swing that $50 per week for paid advertising.

Looking at those two scenarios together, it seems like Uber Eats has created a situation in which smaller, independent restaurants will get pushed further and further down in listings because they can’t pay, making it difficult for customers to discover them and translating into lower sales overall for the business. It adds color to the nightmare I frequently have of living in a world where my only restaurant options are Panda Express and Chipotle.

Uber is at least acting cognizant of this. Along with today’s announcement about the Sponsored Listings launch, the company also said it will put $25 million towards “marketing credits” to “qualified US restaurants.” It made no mention of what qualifies a restaurant for the credits or now much credit a business can reasonably expect to get.

Of course, paying for better visibility is a basic business practice, and Uber Eats is hardly the first online service to run sponsored listings. (Been to Amazon lately?) This morning’s news just might have been a little more digestible if Eats had stuck to the basic facts. Instead, it’s positioned Sponsored Listings as a way of being helpful to businesses when the service will in all likelihood further drive a wedge between the haves and have nots of the restaurant biz.

Deliveroo and Waitrose Launch a 30-Minute Grocery Delivery Trial

Following similar recent moves from other third-party delivery services, Deliveroo is expanding its presence in the world of online grocery shopping. At the tail-end of last week, grocery chain Waitrose announced it will pilot a 12-week program with Deliveroo to get groceries to customers around the UK in as little as 30 minutes.

The news comes just as Waitrose’s longstanding deal with online grocery retailer Ocado comes to an end. From Tuesday, September 1, Ocado will instead deliver groceries from Waitrose rival Marks & Spencer. 

Deliveroo will ferry more than 500 Waitrose items to customers “in as little as 30 minutes,” according to the Waitrose press release. Customers will be able to place orders via Deliveroo from one hour after the shop opens to one hour before it closes. Waitrose says the partnership is meant to “compliment” its own two-hour grocery delivery service.

The Guardian noted over the weekend that Waitrose has seen more than 100,000 extra orders for online groceries since the UK’s pandemic-induced lockdown started. Online grocery orders across the UK have almost doubled thanks to the pandemic. It’s a similar story to what the U.S. is currently experiencing where grocery e-commerce sales hit $7.2 billion in June.

Given all that, it’s no surprise that third-party restaurant delivery services like Deliveroo are diversifying their sales channels to include grocery. Deliveroo, in particular, has struggled to keep business strong during the pandemic as restaurants shutter permanently. For example, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s antitrust watchdog, finally approved Deliveroo’s long-scrutinized deal with Amazon on the grounds that Deliveroo would have had to exit the UK food delivery market without the Seattle giant’s investment.

Adding more grocery services is one way to make up for some of the lost restaurant sales. New sales channels may also give third-party delivery services a fighting chance a profitability, something that keeps getting eroded by fee caps, battles over worker classification, and other regulatory issues.

It’s a narrative we’re familiar with in the U.S., too. Uber Eats now delivers groceries, and DoorDash just announced its own grocery delivery service in addition to its partnerships with convenience stores.

The initial Deliveroo-Waitrose trial, which also starts September 1, will serve about half a million households and, if successful, will extend to more locations in the future.

Grocery Chain H-E-B Opens a Food Hall Offering Takeout and Delivery Meals

Grocery retailer H-E-B further dissolved the boundaries between groceries and restaurants this week when it opened a food hall at one of its Austin, TX stores. Dubbed Main Streat, the venue has five restaurants and a full-service bar.

Given the current state of the foodservice industry, now would seem an odd time to open a public space dedicated to restaurant fare. In most states, restaurant dining rooms must operate a reduced capacity. Many businesses are either mandated or choosing to stick to outdoor patio seating, though that will change once colder weather arrives.

H-E-B has clearly considered all of this, as Main Streat caters to the off-premises customer as much as it does the one who wants a patio table. The company said meals from the venue’s five restaurants are available for pickup and delivery (the latter through local third-party delivery service Favor) along with limited seating inside the food hall and on the patio.The to-go format even applies to alcoholic beverages from the aforementioned full-service bar.

Less than a year ago, starting a foodservice business with a built-in off-premises strategy would have been an anomaly. Catering to takeout and delivery formats was certainly becoming an important strategy for these businesses, but that transition was meant to unfold over a longer period of time, say, five years. The pandemic changed all of that, and H-E-B’s to-go-centric food court is one example of something that will become table stakes very soon for restaurants: opening a business with multiple formats from the start.

Main Streat also underscores how our definition of the word “restaurant” is quickly changing, and how the grocery store is a part of that transition. In the last several months, we’ve seen QSRs selling groceries at the drive-thru, third-party delivery services like DoorDash peddling grocery and convenience store items, and the rise of services like Good Egg selling restaurant meals and supplies via e-commerce. All of which is to say, both restaurants and grocery stores seem to be redefining the word “experience” these days, and often doing so together. The common denominator? Off, premises, obviously. 

From Wiz Khalifa to Tyga, Are Celebrity Ghost Kitchens the Next Big Thing?

Throughout the latter half of 2019, a prediction that came up repeatedly here at The Spoon was celebrity chefs launching their own virtual restaurant concepts. What we didn’t anticipate was just plain ol’ celebrities getting onboard the trend, but that’s exactly what’s happening now.

An announcement this week from delivery integrator Ordermark added more momentum to the celebrity-as-virtual restauranteur trend: rapper Wiz Khalifa forthcoming Hotbox concept.

Wiz Khalifa’s Hotbox restaurant, which is slated to open October 1, will feature a “top-shelf munchie menu” curated by the rapper and powered by Ordermark. The full menu is not available yet, though a couple featured items — the “Taylor Gang Turkey Burger” and “Blazed Ends” dishes — give a pretty good idea of what to expect once the restaurant launches.

Restaurant owners wanting to cook and deliver the forthcoming Hotbox menu from their own kitchens can do so by becoming a fulfillment partner via Nextbite, the delivery-only restaurant company owned by Ordermark. In other words, your local mom-and-pop can now become a ghost kitchen for the Wiz Khalifa brand. That in turn could provide restaurants with some much-needed incremental revenue that might keep some from completely going under during this strange and challenging time for restaurants. 

Cooking someone else’s menu from your own restaurant kitchen isn’t a brand-new concept. As I said, it’s a form of a ghost kitchen that’s employed by the likes of well-known chains like Fatburger and Wow Bao. Tacking a celebrity name to the concept is an intriguing twist on this. A virtual Wiz Khalifa restaurant will generate a certain amount of interest inherently because of the rapper’s status. And if the food winds up being tasty and affordable, there’s potential for restaurants to tap into a Khalifa’s huge fanbase. 

The celebrity-turned-restauranteur thing isn’t brand-new, either, though it’s only been in the last several months we’ve seen this concept go virtual. Rapper Tyga operates a delivery-only restaurant featuring chicken bites. Steve Aoki has a virtual pizza joint called Pizzaoki. Rachel Ray, launched a limited-time virtual restaurant with Uber Eats last year.

And with off-premises orders still the main sales channel for restaurants, delivery companies looking to diversify, and ghost kitchens becoming the norm, the above examples are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. 

Google Continues Its Quiet March Into the Restaurant Biz With Panera Integration

Fast-casual chain Panera today announced a new integration with Google that lets customers order pickup and delivery meals directly via Google’s Search, Maps, and Assistant apps.

It’s a pretty simple setup. Search “Panera” and, if nearby locations of the chain are participating, you’ll see “order pickup” and “order delivery” buttons right beneath the map on the page. You then simply scroll through the menu selecting the items you want to purchase and checkout using your mobile wallet. Those using voice can ask Google Assistant to find the nearest Panera and place your order directly via the device.

It’s no surprise that the Google integration is available for off-premises-only orders. Curbside pickup and delivery remain two of the biggest sales channels for restaurants right now as dining rooms remain either shuttered or operating at reduced capacity. In response, those restaurant chains that have the money to do so are pouring more resources into speeding up the off-premises experience with more digital tools.

Google itself is no stranger to the restaurant business. In fact, the search giant has been something of a sleeping giant the last couple years when it comes to restaurants. In 2019, it added menu recognition to Google Lens, which lets you point a camera at a menu to see popular items, and integrated third-party delivery services directly into Search, Maps, and Assistant. It also partnered with third-party delivery integrator Olo to let restaurants offer delivery via Google.

And with the fate of the restaurant dining room still very uncertain, words like “speed” and “efficiency” are top of the list for many restaurant chains when it comes to their off-premises strategies these days. Panera is no exception. The chain has already inked hybrid delivery partnerships with many of the major services, and recently launched its own geofence-enabled curbside pickup program. 

The Google partnership is available for select Panera stores around the U.S. In all likelihood, it will also press forward the trend of major restaurant chains partnering with Google for off-premises orders.

Report: DoorDash May Go Public in 2020 Amid Broader Delivery Consolidation

DoorDash could file for an IPO as soon as the fourth quarter of 2020, according to “sources familiar with the matter” who spoke to Bloomberg.

The third-party delivery company is reportedly “taking steps” to go public in November or December of this year through a traditional IPO, rather than a direct listing, which the company had considered earlier this year.

The potential IPO comes at a time when the third-party food delivery sector is seeing a steady stream of mergers and acquisitions, from Just Eat Takeaway.com buying up Grubhub to the more recent deal from Uber to snap up Postmates for $2.65 billion.

DoorDash itself has largely stayed out of that M&A activity. The company acquired Caviar for $400 million about a year ago. Since then, DoorDash has been largely focused on diversifying its business. It launched its first ghost kitchen facility in October 2019. And since the start of the pandemic, DoorDash has teamed up with convenience stores like 7-Eleven, launched its own “ghost convenience store,” and, just last week, started an on-demand delivery [— LINK — ] service for groceries.

Those moves make sense in light of the fact that the restaurant industry has been one of the hardest-hit business types by the pandemic. Demand for third-party delivery may be up, but many restaurants — both independents and large chains — are closing down, which means DoorDash may need new lines of business to have a shot of being profitable (which, according to Bloomberg, it is not).

Like other restaurant third-party delivery companies, DoorDash is also navigating a substantial amount of controversy. In April, DoorDash, Grubhub, and others were the subject of a class-action lawsuit alleging third-party delivery companies used their market power to push restaurant prices higher during the pandemic. In June, the San Francisco DA sued DoorDash over worker misclassification, and if a ballot measure that would loosen restrictions over gig worker classification in California does not pass in November, DoorDash (and others) will face another threat to its chances for profitability. That’s to say nothing of commission fee caps, much-maligned tipping policies, and other gripes a growing number of the general public has against third-party delivery companies.

DoorDash was last valued at nearly $16 billion and, throughout the pandemic, has been an “essential service” more and more folks are using as the future of restaurant dining rooms remains uncertain.

Like everything else these days, the timeline for the company’s IPO could change based on, among other factors, the trajectory of the pandemic.