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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

delivery

Uber’s Latest Earnings Reports Underscore the Fragile State of Third-party Delivery

Uber beat estimates but still posted over $1 billion in losses in the most recent quarter, according to the company’s Q3 earnings call this week. While Uber’s Rides business shows signs of stabilizing, other business units, including Eats, are still losing enormous amounts of money.

Losses for the Uber Eats business grew to $316 million, or 67 percent, from $189 million one year ago. And while Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company aims to achieve profitability for 2021, he also in August said, “I don’t expect that business to be profitable in the next year or year after frankly.” Uber Eats team members were part of the layoffs Uber announced in October.

Over the last several months, Uber has unveiled several new features to its business aimed at cross-promoting its Rides and Eats services. Uber Vouchers, for example, is meant to drive more foot traffic to restaurants by subsidizing a user’s ride there. The company also said in September it would merge its Eats app with its main rideshare app.

“We can more quickly and efficiently attract and retain customers, as well as deepen their engagement by linking and cross promoting all of our offerings,” Khosrowshahi said on this week’s call.

But a good cross-promotion strategy won’t necessarily stem the bleeding when it comes to losses for the Eats business. And as Grubhub’s lackluster numbers for the last quarter suggest, the hype around the third-party food delivery services could be cooling down.

One reason for that may be that more restaurants are taking delivery, or at least pieces of it, back under their own control. As restaurant chains move to own more of their branding, credibility, and in some cases the last mile, many are turning to hybrid delivery strategies that only rely on third-party services like Uber Eats for part of the delivery process, which could result in restaurants paying lower fees to these companies.

Then there’s California’s AB 5, which was signed into law in September and classifies contract employees like Uber Eats and DoorDash drivers as employees. Despite Uber, DoorDash, and Lyft committing $90 million to fight the legislation, New York is considering a similar law right now, and others are bound to follow.

On this week’s call, Khosrowshahi reiterated Uber’s plans to defend its stance on AB 5 and similar laws. “So this is going to take dialog,” he said of the issue. “We’re up for that dialogue, and one way or the other we think that our model will thrive and grow.”

Colombian Food Tech Startup Muy Raises $15M to Build More Ghost Kitchens

Just in time for Halloween, Colombian food tech company Muy announced a $15 million Series B round today to expand its ghost kitchen operation to other parts of Latin America. The round was led by ALLVP with participation from previous investor Seaya and brings Muy’s total funding to $20.5 million.

Ghost kitchens — also called virtual kitchens, cloud kitchens, and other names — are shared commercial kitchens restaurants can rent out to fulfill more delivery orders and even try new concepts. The defining feature of a ghost kitchen is its complete lack of a front of house — that is, there’s no dining room, cashier, or servers, and often not even a pickup area. They’re also becoming practically mandatory for restaurants in this delivery-crazed era of food.

Muy, which also operates 20 dine-in restaurants around Colombia, uses what it calls a virtual kitchen and smart chef system to serve delivery guests, who can order and customize food bowls via the Muy mobile app. The company also says it uses AI to make internal operations at its restaurants more efficient and predict demand.

The fresh round of funding will see Muy expand the ghost kitchen portion of its concept to Mexico and Brazil to make delivery more efficient in high-density cities like São Paulo and Mexico City. This won’t be Muy founder José Calderón’s first dabble in food delivery. He co-founded Colombian company Domicilios.com, which Delivery Hero acquired in 2014.

Muy won’t be alone in trying to expand the ghost kitchen concept. In Latin America alone, Rappi, iFood, and Pedidos Ya all compete in the delivery sphere and are contending for would-be customers of ghost kitchens. Meanwhile, Uber Eats operates in dozens of cities in Latin America, and, given its recent efforts with ghost kitchens, could likely one day operate some in that region.

Elsewhere, we’ve seen plenty of news about ghost kitchens peeking out of the shadows. DoorDash announced its own facility earlier this month, Uber Eats has teamed up with Rachel Ray to offer a virtual restaurant where food is prepared in a ghost kitchen, and Fatburger is using its sister brands’ kitchens as places to fulfill more delivery orders.

All of which is to say, it looks ghost kitchen industry is about to see scary new levels of competition.

Thanks to Uber and Lyft, Rideshare and Restaurant Experiences Are Becoming Inseparable

More and more it’s looking like food-related programs are what will help rideshare companies generate more loyalty from both drivers and customers. At least, that’s what Uber and Lyft would have us believe with their respective activities of late, which have been heavily focused on merging rideshares and restaurants into a single experience. And news from Uber today only emphasizes that fact more.

Uber announced this morning a nationwide expansion of its rewards program for food delivery couriers, Uber Eats Pro. The program, which is currently in beta, lets those delivering food via Uber Eats earn points and unlock rewards that include cash back on gas, roadside assistance, some car maintenance costs, and even college tuition. As of now, Pro is available in more than 200 cities to Uber Eats workers, according to an email sent to The Spoon.

Upon signing up with the Uber Eats Pro program, drivers and cyclists automatically become a partner. With each delivery a person makes, they earn points that help them unlock rewards from Uber. Those who maintain a 95 percent or above satisfaction rating from restaurants and customers can achieve different status levels to unlock bigger rewards over time, like roadside assistance and 100 percent tuition coverage at Arizona State University Online. Uber has also partnered with Subway to provide daily refreshments, from drinks to sandwiches, which also increase with a Pro user’s status.

More than anything else, Pro’s expansion seems to be aimed at enticing gig workers to stay loyal to the Uber ecosystem, much as any company uses so-called perks to woo employees. With Pro, the more orders a courier delivers, the closer they get to the more substantial rewards like college tuition. Taking time to make a delivery for a rival service, like Lyft, would only slow down that goal.

Not that Lyft is standing still. That service may not have its own food delivery wing, but it is starting to offer its own set of initiatives for food service workers, too. Last week, Washington, DC-based fast-casual chain &pizza unveiled its Lyft for Late Nights program, which offers &pizza employees discounted rides late at night. On Fridays and Saturdays between 11 p.m. and 5:30 a.m., &pizza employees can take a Lyft for a flat fee of $4.50.

Though the program is still in test phase and only available at seven locations currently, it’s another example of rideshare companies and food-oriented companies coming together to offer workers more perks that keep them happy on the job and locked into the rideshare ecosystem.

This tactic of using perks to increase loyalty isn’t just for workers, either. Both Uber and Lyft have tested initiatives in the past that offer perks to diners that ultimately would keep them tied to that particular rideshare service. In 2017, Lyft attempted a partnership with Taco Bell for the ill-fated Taco Mode program, where users could hit the restaurant chain’s drive-thru en route to another destination.

More palatable have been Uber’s efforts of late. In April, the company announced Uber Vouchers, a program designed to get more foot traffic into restaurants by essentially helping rideshare users to pay for their trip to the restaurant. In September, Uber said it would merge Uber Eats and its main app.

Integrating food — a vital part of life — more deeply into these services would seem like a surefire way to attract more customers. As the outdated saying goes, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

But all these efforts also come at a time when rideshare companies still struggle with profitability. On its most recent earnings call, Uber posted $5.2 billion in losses. Lyft, too, is still hemorrhaging money. Meanwhile, the fight over AB 5 in California, which would reclassify gig workers as employees and upset the entire business model, is hotter than a five-alarm fire. Whether adding more perks for customers and employees can douse flames that high remains doubtful.

Uber Eats Reveals New Drone Design. Here’s How it Could Work With Uber Ghost Kitchens

Uber unveiled its new Uber Eats drone at the Forbes Under 30 Summit today. The company will use this design for actual food deliveries when it begins testing in San Diego next summer.

The new Uber Eats drone has six rotors that rotate, allowing the drone to take off vertically. Once the device is airborne, the rotors turn horizontally to enable faster flight. The drone can carry a payload of “dinner for two,” though it is not meant for direct dropoff at someone’s door. Since the drone only has a round trip range of 12 miles or 18 minutes of flight time, it will be used for the “middle mile” — transporting food from one facility to a staging area where a driver will pick up and make the final delivery.

Adding the driver may see like an extraneous step, but it actually makes more sense if you think about how Uber might use ghost kitchens. Ghost kitchens are shared commercial kitchen facilities that rent space to different restaurants wanting to expand their delivery operations. These virtual restaurants tend to be delivery only and only accessible to customers via app like Uber Eats.

Uber Eats reportedly opened up a ghost kitchen in Paris earlier this year, and just this month opened up a virtual restaurant with Food Network personality, Rachel Ray. It’s not hard to imagine Uber investing more in ghost kitchen spaces, using them to launch more exclusive restaurants that are only available via Uber, and literally topping the buildings off with some kind of drone launch facility on the roof. Centralizing a bunch of virtual restaurants in one launch hub would certainly make using the short haul drones more efficient.

Another advantage to creating a hub and spoke model for Uber drones would be limiting the complexity of dealing with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to create flight paths. Rather than having to chart different flight paths (and any accompanying obstacles or complications) on the fly for different homes, Uber could re-use a set number of flight paths to the same drop off points over and over.

Uber’s drone reveal comes after Google got FAA approval earlier this month to begin commercial drone delivery in Virginia. At the same time, Google’s Wing has partnered for deliveries for FedEx and Walgreens, and unlike Uber’s drones, Wing appears to be dropping off directly at a consumers house via a tether that lowers.

Regardless, there are still a ton of details that need to be worked out before drone delivery is an everyday thing. As I wrote about last week, when it comes to delivery, we are watching the world change in real time, and having to figure it out as we go.

The Week in Restaurants: Starbucks Expands Delivery, Lavu and Omnivore Simplify In-House Tech

Between earnings reports and food delivery bidding wars, there was much to keep a pulse on this week in the restaurant biz. Before you slam into that pumpkin-spice latte on your desk (for shame, btw), here’s a glance at some new developments in restaurant tech from the week.

Starbucks Expands Delivery to 5 New Markets
Starbucks announced this week the latest expansion in its quest to deliver coffee across the nation. Through its Uber Eats program, the chain has added Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and New Jersey, along with further expansion into the New York Metro area. The new locations bring Starbucks total delivery radius to 16 U.S. markets. A nationwide rollout of delivery is expected for early 2020. Now it will need to start adding more ghost kitchen-like locations to help supply the demand of all those lattes in transit.

Lavu and Omnivore Partner to Simplify Third-Party Restaurant Delivery
Point of sale (POS) system Lavu has teamed up with Omnivore to better connect restaurants with third-party technologies up and down the restaurant stack, from back-of-house inventory management to third-party delivery services. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, restaurants using the Lavu POS system will be able to access Omnivore’s marketplace of third-party restaurant technology apps, which includes everything from Uber Eats to Yumpingo to OpenTable. With many restaurants these days lagging in terms of meeting customer demand for technology, Lavu’s POS capabilities with Omnivore’s more than 200 integrations definitely makes access to tech easer.

McDonald’s Franchisee Eliminates 200 Tons of Plastic Waste
To help combat the terrifying problem of single-use plastics in which we now find ourselves, Arcos Dorados, the world’s largest McDonald’s franchisee, announced this week it has eliminated about 200 tons of single-use plastics since removing straws from its beverages. Arcos Dorados, which operates 2,200 McDonald’s locations across Latin America, says the effort is part of McDonald’s ongoing contributions to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The company plans by 2025 to make all McDonald’s packaging from renewable, recycled, or certified sources. Whether that material will actually get recycled is a question for another Friday.

From Power to Perception, What Challenges Do Drone and Robot Delivery Need to Tackle?

The devil is in the details, as they say, and this became more apparent then ever after I moderated a panel on robot and drone delivery at GreenBiz’s Verge 19 conference in Oakland, CA this week. These devilish details, however, are important for everyone involved in the food space: retailers, delivery services, governments and even consumers to consider as autonomous robotic delivery moves from sci-fi to sidewalk.

On the panel were Jill North, Innovation and New Technology Program Manager for the City of San Jose; Natasha Blum Founder & Principal Director, Research & Strategy at Blumline; Matthew Lipka, Federal Public Policy Lead for Nuro; and Connor French, General Counsel at Zipline International.

The biggest takeaway from our lively discussion was just how complicated it is to deploy robots and drones, and how we are learning about these complications in real time. This was perfectly illustrated with news this week that the University of Pittsburgh is pausing its robot delivery with Starship because the robots may have been blocking people from wheelchairs from accessing the sidewalk. The real world has a way of bringing up complexities that may not have been foreseen while testing or were perhaps just ignored.

As a government employee, the real world is very much where North works. As an employee of the city of San Jose, she has to find a balance between pushing innovation ahead and not leaving people behind. Robots can’t be implemented just because they are cool, or because they get tech bros their burritos faster. She needs to answer questions like who has access to these new services? How will they interact with emergency services? How will they get electrical power? And because all this is so new, there aren’t a lot of answers right now.

Blum, however, is in the business of finding answers. Her Blumline research and design firm helped work on Postmates’ Serve robot by taking an ethnographic approach. Her team went into specific communities to learn what would be considered friendly or off-putting in a robot design. For example: should a robot sit higher and be more visible and sacrifice maneuverability or the other way around? One interesting outcome of Blum’s work could be that robots are customized for each community, featuring different colors or designs that make people more comfortable with the emerging automation in our lives.

Another technology that faces an uphill battle when it comes to getting people on board is drones. As French explained, drones are either associated with battlefield killing machines, tools of a surveillance state, or just the loud, buzzy nuisance that someone flies at the park. This puts the drone industry in a bit of a conundrum. It needs to expand into more benevolent purposes (e.g. medicine and food delivery to remote or hard to reach areas), but it can’t do so until more people are more comfortable with the idea of drones flying over their neighborhoods.

One company already in neighborhoods is Nuro, which has been using its pod-like, low-speed vehicles for grocery delivery in cities like Scottsdale, AZ, and Houston, TX. Lipka pointed out was that even if you work and engage with cities, communities and consumers, Mother Nature can still come along and throw you a curveball. A curveball like haboobs, which are intense dust storms that spring up in places like Arizona. These storms can do all kinds of damage to the sensors and cameras on a Nuro. Learning to interact with the idiosyncrasies associated with different environments is something robot and drone designers must pay attention to as well.

Finally, the big, yet-to-be-answered question from all of this innovation in the drone and robot delivery space is: Who pays for what? As North pointed out, more autonomous robot delivery means fewer people paying for parking, a major source of municipal income. Who pays for the upkeep of roads or new infrastructure like expanded sidewalks or special lanes on roads? The taxpayer? The private company?

This is all new territory, and again, it’s evolving in real-time right in front of us. But discussions like the one from this panel will help more people think about and develop strategies around solving the issues before they happen, rather than trying to fix them after the fact.

AI, Voice Tech, and a $4B Delivery Business Are Turning McDonald’s Into a Tech Company

Traffic may have been sluggish and continued growth a challenge during the last few months, but, McDonald’s shows no signs of slowing when it comes to technology initiatives. On the company’s Q3 earnings call this week, CEO Steve Easterbrook emphasized McDonald’s existing achievements as well as future ambitions for digital initiatives like delivery, the drive-thru, self-order kiosks, and mobile ordering.

Delivery remains the centerpiece of McDonald’s digital growth strategy — and its biggest driver. Easterbrook said on the call that the company expects delivery to drive $4 billion of global systemwide sales — up from $1 billion just three years ago.

On average globally, customers place 10 delivery orders per second, and Easterbrook, and McDonald’s saw an increase in those orders when it added DoorDash as a delivery partner in July, ending its longstanding exclusive deal with Uber Eats.

On this week’s earnings call, McDonald’s also highlighted its efforts in the drive-thru lane, where the chain has been deploying its Dynamic Yield technology that uses machine learning to personalize suggestions for customers based on data like weather, time of day, and popular menu items. McDonald’s acquired the tech in March of this year. Dynamic Yield is now installed at more than 9,500 McDonald’s drive-thrus in the U.S., with deployment plans for nearly every U.S. location with an outdoor digital menu board “expected by year-end,” Easterbrook said. The company will also roll out Dynamic Yield across all of Australia by 2020 and is currently evaluating future locations as well as the role of the technology in things like self-order kiosks and the McDonald’s mobile app. “Ultimately Dynamic Yield will facilitate a range of personalization benefits where we can leverage knowledge of the customer and order patterns to provide a tailored experience in restaurants at the drive-thru and on our app,” Easterbrook said.

Also fueling this drive towards more personalization for customers is Apprente, the Silicon Valley-based voice-ordering tech startup McDonald’s acquired in September of this year. Easterbrook said on the call he expects the technology to reduce complexity for McDonald’s workers — a known factor is longer wait times at the drive-thru nowadays. “Apprente talent and technology comes with the promise of more efficient and accurate ordering at the drive-thru, and a better experience for our customers.”

For the drive-thru, especially, efficiency remains an ongoing challenge. According to recent numbers, drive-thru wait times have significantly lengthened over time thanks to more complex menus as well as restaurants trying to accommodate the rising number of mobile orders their employees juggle in addition on those made onsite. Multiple QSRs are using different methods to combat this slowdown, from Chipotle’s “Chipotlans,” which are dedicated drive-thrus for mobile orders, to KFC’s drive-thru of the future, which is primarily designed to serve mobile orders.

While these efforts and others tackle some aspects of the drive-thru lag, they currently lack one of the key elements to the future of the drive-thru: using AI to predict both customer preferences and future demand, so that restaurants can be better prepared. Thanks to its efforts around Dynamic Yield and Apprente, McDonald’s still leads the QSR industry on that score — though others are bound to follow, and no doubt soon.

With Delivery and Drive-Thru, Chipotle Is Aiming to Make Digital a $1 Billion Business

Chipotle’s is “knocking on the door of digital becoming $1 billion business,” CEO Brian Niccol said on a the company’s Q3 2019 earnings call today.

Digital sales for the fast-casual chain grew 88 percent year-over-year during the quarter, to $257 million, representing 18.3% of sales for the quarter, he said.

As expected, Niccol noted that delivery remains a major driver for digital growth for the company. Since 2018, Chipotle has had a partnership with DoorDash that includes integrated delivery — where orders made on the DoorDash platform go directly to Chipotle’s in-house POS system — to speed up service. The company was also one of the early adopters of the increasingly popular hybrid delivery strategy, where restaurants can use a combination of in-house and third-party functionality to built out a delivery operation that best suits their individual businesses.

Delivery may have been front and center for Chipotle this past quarter, but the company’s efforts around the drive-thru are also becoming a major part of its digital strategy. Once known as a chain that rejected the idea of the drive-thru, Chipotle has since begun adding these so-called “Chipotlanes,” which are drive-thru lanes dedicated to mobile orders. On the earnings call today, Chipotle CFO Jack Hartung said that “based on the early success of Chipotlanes, we shifted our real estate strategy to seek more sites that can accommodate a Chipotlane.” Chipotle currently has more than 80 restaurants under construction, he said, and about half of those will have a Chipotlane, bringing the company’s total of them to 60 by the end of 2019.

Drive-thru lanes across the QSR industry have gotten slower over the last decade as menus get more complicated and restaurants struggle to keep up with changing consumer expectations around technology and digital capabilities. Adding more dedicated lanes for mobile orders will help, but the real technology to keep an eye on in the drive-thru will be AI. On that front, Chipotle isn’t completely silent. The company has been “quietly” introducing AI into stores over the last several months in the form of AI-powered voice assistants for phone orders. If Chipotle wants to realize its ambitions of digital becoming a billion-dollar business, it will need to double-down on these efforts and others in the AI realm in the coming months.

Uber Eats Makes Pickup Feature Available Nationwide, Launches Food Guides

Today, Uber Eats announced that the Pickup feature on its on-demand restaurant food app is now available to customers nationwide. According to an article this morning in USA Today, the company has been testing the feature in San Diego, Phoenix, and Austin and has now made it available to all customers in the U.S.

Pickup is just as it sounds: Uber Eats customers order their food through the app as usual. Then, instead of paying a delivery fee and waiting for someone to drop the food at their door, they go to the restaurant and collect it themselves.

While hardly a new concept, having a pickup option for food seems a necessary step when it comes to appealing to certain parts of the population, particularly in dense urban areas where the restaurant of choice might be on the next block and the $5 delivery fee is not justifiable on such an order. Other major on-demand food competitors — Grubhub, DoorDash, and Postmates — already offer the pickup option to customers. Why Uber Eats has waited so long to unveil its own version of pickup remains a mystery, but with both off-premises orders and competition among third-party aggregators increasing, the service needs every tool it can possibly utilize to entice more diners.

Speaking of which: Simultaneous to the nationwide rollout of Pickup, Eats also launched its Uber Eats Pickup Guides Powered by JUMP. The guides, run by Uber’s JUMP electric bike and scooter program, trace the most efficient route between different local restaurants that offer Uber Eats. While definitely more of a gimmick than anything else, it’s at least a nicely designed one. If you’re visiting a city, it’s also a convenient way to scoot around exploring the different food options — all, of course, while staying well contained inside the Uber Ecosystem.

The Pickup Guides are available for Austin, Washington, DC, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, and Sacramento.

These new features come on the heels of news that Uber is laying off 1 percent of its workforce, including some Uber Eats staff. The company continues to struggle with financial losses, and Eats, in particular, isn’t likely to become a profitable business for some time. Alas, a pickup feature and a handy city guide aren’t likely to change those facts.

Royal Caribbean Wants to be King of the World for Cruise Ship Food Delivery

By now, food delivery has made its way into college campuses, baseball stadiums, and traffic jams. It’s been only ever a matter of time before cruise ships followed, and this week, Royal Caribbean announced it is testing a food delivery service onboard its Symphony of the Seas ship.

According to a post on the Royal Caribbean blog, guests can now order food from specialty restaurants onboard via the main Royal Caribbean app.

Once signed into the app, guests will see an option to get food delivered from select restaurants on the ship. Right now that includes Johnny Rockets, Sorrentos pizza, and Izumi sushi. Like any other food-ordering app, guests select the items they want and designate where they would like the food delivered, be it their stateroom or some other place on the ship. If the latter, a user can select which deck of the ship they are on then drag a pinpoint to their exact location. There are a few “no delivery zones” onboard, which include pools, theaters, and other restaurants.

Image via Royal Caribbean.

Since the closest I’ve ever gotten to being onboard a cruise is reading a David Foster Wallace essay, I can’t personally speak to how exciting this news is. But groundbreaking or no, it’s to be expected. With food delivery being a “must have” for restaurants nowadays, it’s moved on to larger entertainment venues. And cruise ships are basically just massive entertainment space that float.

Nor is Royal Caribbean the first to try food delivery. This past summer, Carnival Cruise started testing delivery functionality in its own app for pizza and beverages, using a similar pin-drop functionality for users to designate their location.

A natural question is whether we’ll see third-party aggregators like DoorDash and Uber Eats try to hop onboard and scoop up some of the competition. On the one hand, cruise tend to be closed ecosystems, so to speak, of carefully curated experiences, so ceding some of that power to third parties doesn’t necessarily make sense. However, Postmates has already struck deals with baseball stadiums (see above) and essentially become part of the in-house branding, so it’s a stretch but not out of the question to think we might see them or another service on the sea at some point in future.

Week in Restaurant Tech: Burger King’s Silent Drive-thru, Customers Fear Data Breaches

Another year another Smart Kitchen Summit, which happened this week and included much discourse on the connected kitchen, food as medicine, and, of course, how tech is changing the restaurant world. And while the event is over, there’s still plenty of news from the week to catch up on. Here are a few more tidbits of what went on in restaurants:

Burger King Launches Silent Drive-Thru

Burger King is up to its PR stunts again, this time capitalizing on the stereotype that people in Finland hate small talk. The resulting Silent Drive-thru option is exactly as it sounds: You order via the BK mobile app, select the “Silent Drive-thru” option, then wait in a dedicated parking space until an employee drops your food off with nary a “hello” exchanged. While Burger King has admitted the promotion — originally meant to boost mobile app orders — is “a bit of an exaggeration,” it has also doubled sales via the app and sped up orders by 7 to 8 minutes, according to Adweek. No word on whether you still have to make eye contact with the person dropping off your Whopper.

Image via Qu.

POS Company Qu Launches New Platform

Maryland-based POS company Qu introduced a bundle of new features this week as part of a new “data-centric platform” meant to improve the POS experience for restaurants. Among the new offerings are the ability to directly integrate orders from third-party sources directly into the POS system, a unified menu management system, and greater ability to add dynamic pricing options to items. The idea behind these new features is to end some of the fragmentation that’s entered the restaurant industry of late thanks to new sales channels and multiple versions of menus floating around.

Image via Unsplash.

Over Half of QSR Customers Worry About Data Breaches

Digital security company Sift released new research this week that suggests data breaches are a major concern for QSR diners. Over half — 62 percent — of survey respondents said they are concerned their digital interactions with QSRs will lead to fraud like stolen payment information, hijacked accounts, and fake reviews. Meanwhile, 49 percent said they would hold the restaurant responsible for any fraudulent activity. While Sift’s report is obviously a little biased in urging companies to prioritize security of their digital properties, there’s nonetheless plenty of truth to the idea. Just ask DoorDash.

Domino’s Is Losing Its Legal Battle Over Website Accessibility. Good

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal from Domino’s fighting a ruling that a blind customer could sue the chain for violation of the American Disabilities Act (ADA) after he couldn’t use the Domino’s website to order a pizza. The ruling comes at a time when the restaurant experience is more digital than ever thanks to the growing popularity of things like mobile ordering, delivery, and ghost kitchens. It will also likely trigger more action on the part of restaurant chains to make their digital properties accessible to those with disabilities.

For a quick backstory, in July, Domino’s petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of California resident Guillermo Robles, a blind customer who filed the lawsuit after two failed attempts to order a customized pizza from the Domino’s website and app. Robles argued that protections under the ADA apply to online properties as well as brick-and-mortar ones. Domino’s refuted the point, stating that the ADA regulations were written long before digital restaurant ordering existed and that the government hasn’t yet issued rules on how businesses should make their websites ADA compliant.

The puzzling element of this case has always been that Domino’s is a massive entity with ample resources to put towards improving the way its website and app functions for the disabled. That Domino’s prides itself on being more a tech company these days than a pizza chain makes the case even more of a head scratcher. You would think a company that wants to be known for its technology-forward approach to business would be falling over itself to set the standard for ADA-compliant digital properties.

But the opposite seems to be true. Domino’s has instead argued that the recent “tsunami of website accessibility litigation” by plaintiffs is “exploiting the absence of a standard for their own benefit” and that federal standards need to be put in place.

While it’s true that digital properties present more challenges when it comes to staying ADA compliant, Domino’s argument overall has been weak from the start. Rather than use the case as an opportunity to help create clearer regulations and become known as a champion of more ethical tech, the chain has instead chosen to spend millions of dollars fighting a ruling it will in all likelihood still have to comply with.

It’s estimated that blindness in the U.S. is expected to double to more than 8 million people by 2050. Meanwhile, around 26.9 million U.S. adults have some vision loss.

At the same time, though, more than 5 billion people own mobile devices, at least half of which are smartphones, the restaurant experience is only getting more reliant on digital properties. Add to that the rising popularity of delivery-only ghost kitchens, which wouldn’t exist without digital devices, and it’s easy to see why the issue of restaurants making their properties ADA compliant is so urgent now.

While a large number of restaurant websites are still not designed for ADA compliance, this week’s ruling should certainly motivate other chains to provide an acceptable level of service via digital properties to those with visual, auditory, and cognitive disabilities. If Domino’s is smart, it will start using some of its innovation muscle to be part of the solution, rather than continuing to paint itself as the villain of the story.