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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

delivery

Ford Developing Bi-Pedal Robot to Carry Deliveries from Driverless Cars to Your Door

Plenty of companies are bringing robot-powered delivery of food and other household goods to the last mile, but most stop at the last few feet. Autonomous cars park at a curb and little rover bots typically can’t climb the front steps of a house.

Which is why Ford is working on a bi-pedal robot that literally walks deliveries from driverless cars right up to your front door(h/t to Bloomberg). Dr. Ken Washington, Vice President, Ford Research and Advanced Engineering, and Chief Technology Officer published a post on Medium today outlining the program, writing:

Enter Digit, a two-legged robot designed and built by Agility Robotics to not only approximate the look of a human, but to walk like one, too. Built out of lightweight material and capable of lifting packages that weigh up to 40 pounds, Digit can go up and down stairs, walk naturally through uneven terrain, and even react to things like being bumped without losing its balance and falling over.

Like something straight out of an Asimov novel, Digit folds up and sits in the back of a driverless delivery van. When a package needs to be delivered, it emerges from the vehicle, stands up and carries the package to a person’s doorstop. Digit doesn’t have a ton of autonomy gear and processing power on it. Instead, the driverless car, which is packed with sensors and mapping equipment, sees the surrounding area and sends Digit the best path to the door. If Digit needs help, or encounters something unexpected, the problem can be sent up to the cloud where another system (perhaps even a human) can assist.

Though the Ford post didn’t mention groceries specifically, they are a good use case for this type of robot delivery. Groceries are heavy, and even if a driverless car brings them to a house, a person still needs to go out to the street to retrieve and lug them back inside. The weight of groceries is one of the reasons self-driving delivery company, AutoX moved more into (the much lighter) restaurant food. For most, this walking to the curb is a minor inconvenience, but for those who have trouble moving, a robot walking packages to the door would be a big help.

Ford isn’t alone in getting goods up directly to your front door. Earlier this year, FedEx unveiled a its own delivery robot that can climb stairs (though it uses wheels, not legs), and Amazon received a patent for an autonomous robot that would live in a home’s garage and would venture out to fetch packages from delivery trucks.

There’s no word on when or if this particular version of Ford’s delivery vision will be coming to a neighborhood near you, there are still a lot of regulatory hurdles for self-driving vehicles to get through. But with the pace of innovation, robots are bound to be bounding up your walkway to deliver a package someday soon.

Forget IPOs. DoorDash Is the One to Watch Right Now in Third-Party Delivery

Grubhub still leads the third-party food delivery market in terms of sales, and of late, Postmates and Uber Eats have gotten a lot of attention for their respective pre- and post-IPO news. But DoorDash may well be the most important company to watch in the escalating showdown for third-party delivery dominance, according to new data from tech company Second Measure.

Second Measure analyzes anonymized credit card transactions and uses that data to shed light on customer behaviors. In the world of third-party delivery, those behaviors underscore the rapid growth DoorDash has undergone recently, growth that has the company almost on equal footing with Grubhub in terms of monthly sales. Grubhub leads the market, with 32 percent of total monthly sales. But the company’s growth is now slower than its competitors, as evidenced in the following graph:

Source: Second Measure

DoorDash, meanwhile, holds 30 percent of the market in terms of monthly sales, and unlike Grubhub, it’s still growing rapidly. In February 2019, DoorDash closed a $400,000 million round and had a valuation of $7.1 billion. Besides investors, Second Measure notes in its report that DoorDash saw “a staggering 216-percent year-over-year jump [in sales], compared to 58 percent at Uber Eats and 4 percent at Grubhub.”

Part of those rising sales numbers are no doubt due to DoorDash’s aggressive push across the country. The service is the only third-party delivery service right now to be in all 50 U.S. states, in case you couldn’t tell from the endless numbers of promotions and partnerships the company does with everyone from Canter’s Deli in LA to Taco Bell to the Wyndham Hotels chain. The service is also now in 50 Canadian cities.

Impressive as the numbers are, no one’s place in the third-party delivery market seems certain because the space changes so rapidly — something that will continue for the rest of 2019 and beyond. DoorDash will have to work hard at retaining its customers if it wants to keep up. And as Second Measure and others have noted, loyalty to any one service isn’t something third-party delivery customers prioritize. For example, in the first quarter of 2017, 88 percent of Grubhub’s customers didn’t use another service; two years later, that number has dropped to 62 percent.

Unless, that is, you’re in the south. It seems of all the third-party delivery services out there, Waitr, who’s business is more focused on second-tier U.S. cities, has the highest number of loyal customers on the list. Waitr (who recently acquired Bite Squad) doesn’t (yet) have the reach or growth rate of DoorDash, but focusing on customer loyalty in cities that aren’t New York, LA, or other major metropolises could eventually be hugely advantageous. DoorDash should take note.

Burger King Wheels Whoppers to LA Drivers Stuck in Traffic, Begins Impossible Roll Out

Burger King announced this week that it is rolling out two new Whoppers to two very different audiences, as the fast food chain shows how it’s adapting to modern times in a fun, playful and dare we say, smart way.

First up, Burger King announced it will deliver Whoppers to LA motorists stuck in traffic. The appropriately titled Traffic Jam Whopper project invites drivers stuck in high-density traffic to order burgers directly from their cars. Burger King uses real-time data to pinpoint the most heavily congested areas of the city at any given time (which, in LA is pretty much everywhere between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.), then offers food to customers stuck in that jam via push notifications and Waze banner ads.

As a driver inches their way through the traffic, they’ll pass through different “delivery zones,” which are areas within a 1.9-mile radius from the nearest Burger King, calculated using traffic and customer data so that Burger King knows which location to use for each customer. Upon entering one of these delivery zones, they can place an order through the BK app. (For safety and legal reasons, orders have to be placed via voice command.) When the food is ready, a Burger King driver hops on a motorcycle and lane splits their way to the car’s exact location to drop the food. Waze banners and digital billboards posted along the delivery zones display information about an order’s progress.

Right now, the Traffic Jam Whopper project only offers the regular Whopper combo meal, which comes with fries and a bottled soda or water.

Burger King ran a hugely successful pilot of the ongoing campaign, which it’s conducting with ad agency We Believers, in Mexico City recently. After Los Angeles, Shanghai and São Paulo are next.

LA, who’s ranked fifth in terms of worst U.S. traffic at peak rush hour times, is an ideal setting for a campaign like this. Unlike in NYC or Boston where you have to weave around pedestrian traffic through a network of narrow streets, in LA everyone’s on the freeway after work.

If it all sounds good to be true, check out a video of the Traffic Jam Whopper project in action in Mexico City:

Burger King | "Traffic Jam Whopper"

If you’re like us, you might be wondering, Can I get the new Impossible Whopper delivered to my car? Sadly for hungry flexitarians, Los Angeles is not one of the cities where they can get an Impossible Whopper while stuck on the 405. That said, Burger King did announce yesterday it had started its national expansion of the much buzzed-about plant-based burger into three new cities: Miami, Columbus, GA, and Montgomery, AL. These new burghs join St. Louis, MO, which was the first city to get the Impossible Whopper.

Burger King is hitting the road in a different manner, visiting these three new cities in the “Impossible Whopper Tour Bus,” which is intended amp up excitement around the plant-based patty’s expansion with games, music, and free swag. Hopefully it doesn’t get stuck in too much traffic on the way.

Wendy’s Doubles-Down on Its Tech Ambitions Post Earnings Call

If there’s one big takeaway to glean from Wendy’s first-quarter 2019 earnings call, which took place on Wednesday, it’s that the quick-service burger chain is ramping up its tech game in a big way.

Not that the Dublin, OH-based company was slacking. Prior to Wednesday’s call, Wendy’s had already installed self-serve kiosks in about 75 percent of its (North American) stores, accelerated its delivery program with DoorDash, and made progress on redesigning existing stores to better serve the digital needs QSRs in 2019 must meet.

Based on the transcript from this week’s earnings call, those initiatives have so far paid off. CEO Todd Penegor noted on the call that Wendy’s saw “system-wide sales growth” and that the company continues “to make meaningful progress with [its] consumer-facing digital capabilities.”

That progress includes further expansion of its delivery program, which Penegor said “continues to pace ahead of expectations.” The company plans to have 80 percent of its North American system available for delivery by the end of 2019, along with a more streamlined mobile app that will integrate DoorDash and make off-premise ordering an easier experience for customers. Mobile ordering will be available across the North American Wendy’s market by the end fo the year. (It currently operates in 75 percent of North America.)

A newer initiative for Wendy’s is the introduction of digital scanners, which are part of Wendy’s $25 billion investment in digital initiatives. Penegor said on the call the company plans to have scanners in all its restaurants by the end of 2019. Speed is the obvious benefit here, as the technology will allow employees to simply scan mobile coupons on orders, rather than keying them into a POS system, as was done previously.

For a QSR, however, providing speed at scale is almost important as the quick turnaround times themselves. Penegor said as much on the call, going as far as to say that scale “allows you to make investments in such things as enhanced training and tools, and that those with scale will ultimately win.”

Wendy’s celebrated its 50th birthday this year, but in terms of digital adoption, it has moved slower than McDonald’s, whose aggressive “experience of the future” redesign and foray into personalized recommendations have garnered much attention of late. That said, so has its ongoing battle with its franchisees, for whom all this new technology is sometimes more of an albatross around the neck than a revenue generator.

Wendy’s hasn’t reported any such friction as yet, so it will be important to keep an eye on the company as it scales its tech plans across the continent. They may not have a Dynamic Yield-like deal in the works yet (that we know of), but they could be creating a solid blueprint for growth worth mimicking in future.

At Portland’s MilkRun, Groceries Get Dropped Off by a Farmer to Your Table

Running a farm is hard. Even once you’ve produced your cherries/chicken/cheese, you still have the go through the struggle of finding customers — and figuring out how to get your products to them.

Julie Niiro, CEO of the online farm-to-table marketplace MilkRun, knew all about this issue. She became a farmer about five years ago and was surprised by how difficult it was to find customers or even staff a farmers market. “There was a clear challenge of distribution,” she told me over the phone.

Two years ago she founded MilkRun to connect farmers and people who want farm-fresh food. The startup, which operates exclusively in Portland, OR, works with about 90 different producers making everything from baked goods to meat to vegetables. Customers can fill up a virtual “basket” on the MilkRun webpage (they’re working on an app), then select delivery for Tuesday or Thursday. Once the order window closes, farmers bring the goods to a micro-depot. There, MilkRun staff aggregates the products to fulfill customers orders.

Here’s where things get a little wacky: the delivery is done not by Milkrun staff or third party delivery drivers, but by the farmers themselves.

Photo: Julia Niiro, CEO of MilkRun.

“We didn’t want to put more trucks on the road, and we also wanted to figure out more ways to pay farmers,” explained Niiro.

Basically, farmers already on their way out of the city after dropping off at the micro-hub will get loaded up with already packed orders and to deliver on their way back to the farm. MilkRun built its own software to manage micro-hub inventory and determine farmers’ delivery routes. Milkrun also provides a navigation app to farmers to let them know exactly where to drop off which orders, sort of like Uber or Lyft.

Unlike Uber or Lyft, though, the delivery window is not exactly…exact. Delivery occurs sometime between 7am and 3pm on the designated day (only Tuesday or Thursday for now), though as Niiro told me: “things do happen.” Understandable, but that wide of a gap — plus unintended delays — could make scheduling a time to be home for the delivery sort of a hassle.

Though MilkRun certainly lacks the near-instant gratification of Instacart or AmazonFresh delivery, it has no delivery fee and requires no subscription. It currently serves around 3,000 people and 11 restaurants and is in the middle of raising a seed round.

Though it’s only available in Portland for now, Niiro hopes to be piloting MilkRun in Seattle by the end of this year before eventually expanding into Austin and Denver. The company’s technology platform — which manages customers’ orders, farmer inventory, and delivery routes — should be able to scale fairly easily. The bigger question is whether Niiro and her team can build relationships with farmers in each new territory, and get enough on board to help with deliveries.

Price-wise, Niiro says that they try to be on par with what you’d find in retail. Maybe that’s true if you’re shopping somewhere upscale like Whole Foods, but the budget grocery shopper would likely balk at some of the prices ($1.50 for one blood orange or $7 for a dozen eggs). Which makes sense, since MilkRun doesn’t charge a delivery fee and needs to charge a higher rate in order to pay farmers a fair wage, plus some extra coin for doing the deliveries. Admittedly the goods on MilkRun’s site are a clear cut above what you’d find in an average supermarket, but still — it’s not really accessible to those on a tight budget.

Other companies have already proven that there’s a demand for services that deliver farmed goods directly to the consumer. In the U.K., high-end grocery delivery service FarmDrop gives consumers the option to have farm products shipped to their door. Closer to home, Grubmarket, which helps farmers sell their goods directly to consumers or corporations, just raised $25 million. Though it only operates within California, GoodEggs also offers a similarly curated grocery delivery service.

Niiro thinks that MilkRun can distinguish itself by controlling the whole distribution process from when it leaves the farm until when it touches down on a customer’s doorstep. The question will be if it can offer something new that its competitors can’t. The delivery-by-farmer piece seems to be Milkrun’s biggest value add since it reduces the need for staff and incentivizes more farmers to join up.

Then again, I don’t think farm-to-table delivery is a zero-sum game. Consumers are demanding healthier, more sustainable foods, and are willing to pay more for them. We’ll have to see if MilkRun’s value add of end-to-end delivery control is enough to make it stand out from the competition.

I Tried Daily Harvest, The Pre-Made Frozen Meal Delivery Service For Millennials

I’ve always wanted to be a smoothie person: someone who starts the day on a healthy note with a cup of blended vegetables. Instead I usually settle for toast.

But all that changed this week when I worked my way through a box of Daily Harvest’s smoothie and meal cups. The company is a subscription service that sends pre-portioned cups of frozen healthy food to your door, from smoothies to overnight oats, matcha lattés, grain bowls, and even soups.

Photo: Catherine Lamb

How it works
To get Daily Harvest delivered to your door, you first have to select your subscription level: either weekly (6, 9, 12, or 24 (!!!) cups per week) or monthly (24 cups per month). Next, you select your cups from Daily Harvest’s selection of sweet and savory pre-prepped options.

Subscriptions can be an issue when it applies to food that can go bad (case in point: meal kits). However, this issue doesn’t really apply to Daily Harvest since all their food is frozen, so consumers can choose exactly when they want to make their kale smoothie or harvest bowl. They can also stop or pause their subscription whenever their freezer gets full or they want to take a break. Bonus: pre-frozen ingredients means you don’t have to dilute your smoothie with ice.

The pros
When the order arrived at my door I was initially concerned about the excessive packaging — a blight for many meal delivery services. But, at least according to Daily Harvest’s website, the cardboard delivery box is recyclable, as are the meal cups themselves. The liner holding the dry ice is biodegradable and purportedly made of recycled denim, which is pretty cool. So props to Daily Harvest on the packaging front!

My box had a mixture of sweet and savory options, including:

  • Matcha + Lemongrass Latte
  • Cacao + Avocado Smoothie
  • Ginger + Greens Smoothie
  • Sweet Potato + Wild Rice Hash
  • Cauliflower Rice + Pesto
  • Brussels Sprouts + Lime Pad Thai

The preparation itself couldn’t be easier. For the smoothies, you fill the cups of pre-chopped ingredients to the top with the liquid of your choice, dump the whole thing into a blender, and blitz into oblivion. My one small critique is that I found a few smoothies too thick and had to eventually add more liquid to thin them out.

The savory bowl options were even simpler: just dump the cup into a bowl, microwave, and eat.

Another benefit is that you can pour the smoothies/bowls right back into their cup container for transport or on-the-go consumption. There’s even a little opening on the lid for a straw.

I was pleasantly surprised by the taste. The smoothies taste “healthy,” but not in an undrinkable way. The ingredients were clearly fresh-frozen and the caliber was about as good as I’d get at an artisanal smoothie bar. There were a few misses in the savory options — undercooked sweet potatoes or mushy cauliflower rice — but overall the flavors there were also pretty delicious.

The cons
My biggest qualm with Daily Harvest was the size of some of the portions. The smoothies were pretty hearty, filled with good fats from avocados and almonds, and always kept me full throughout the morning. However, the savory cups usually only filled up half a bowl at most topped out around 300 calories. If I ate one for lunch, I typically ended up hunting for a snack by 3pm.

Daily Harvest’s pricing is also pretty high. Weekly delivery shakes out between $7.49 and $7.99 per cup, while monthly delivery will set you back $167.76 ($6.99 per cup).

That said, if you buy a smoothie at a fancy-pants juice bar it’ll likely cost you around 10 bucks, so Daily Harvest’s options are actually slightly cheaper. And since you don’t have to shop or prep any of the ingredients yourself, you’re certainly paying a premium for convenience and flexibility. But it still feels pretty expensive to me, especially since you can buy pre-chopped frozen fruits and veggies at the supermarket on the cheap. For the savory bowls, the cost doesn’t seem worth what you got.

Conclusions
Though Daily Harvest probably isn’t for me — I like doing my own shopping and cooking too much, and am a real cheapskate — I think it merges a few trends we’ve been seeing a lot of lately.

First and foremost, Daily Harvest nails it on convenience from every aspect. Its meals are pre-prepped, pre-cooked, and ship directly to your door. The company also capitalizes off of the recent boom in frozen food, which gives consumers access to healthy food with flexibility around when and what they want to eat. Lastly, with its bright hues and prominent avocado imagery, Daily Harvest really pops on Instagram and other social media sales channels.

Then again, the cost aspect is a real issue. I can’t be the only person who would balk at the thought of spending that kind of money for someone else to chop my vegetables and assemble them into smoothie-ready packages.

In the end, I think Daily Harvest’s pre-prepped meals are a smart offering. By combining ease and convenience, they’re sure to attract a contingent of busy millennials who wants to take the guesswork out of healthy eating. The question is if those customers will stick to their Daily Harvest subscription plan even as the costs add up, especially if the offerings don’t alway satisfy.

Me? I’m sticking with toast.

Want to keep up all things plant-based? Subscribe to Future Food Newsletter for a weekly update on what’s happening in the world of alternative protein.

Kitchen United Announces Another Expansion for Its Ghost Kitchens

Kitchen United (KU) is making good on its promise to open multiple new locations over the course of 2019. The company announced another expansion today, this time for new locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as a second spot in Chicago.

KU launched in 2017 with the aim to provide extra kitchen space for restaurants needing to fulfill off-premises (delivery) orders. The first KU location, in Pasadena, California, holds enough space for 15 restaurants to use. Other locations are similar in size.

Whereas some ghost kitchens exist to let restaurants or entrepreneurs try out new concepts and brands they might not have otherwise brought to market, Kitchen United is specifically aimed at helping existing restaurants manage the extra volume in orders created by delivery.

And the demand for delivery grows, we can expect to see more of these so-called ghost kitchens, from Kitchen United and others. The market for online food delivery is projected to be $30 billion by 2022 — and that’s just for the U.S.

Various iterations of the ghost kitchen have been popping up in response, and raising some hefty funds. Berlin-based company Keatz recently raised €12 million (~$13.6 million USD) for its virtual-kitchen network that operates around Europe. Uber is dabbling with its own ghost kitchens in Paris. Uber’s former CEO, Travis Kalanick, now runs a cloud kitchen company in Los Angeles.

Kitchen United, meanwhile, has expanded from the original Pasadena, CA location to Chicago’s River North neighborhood, and has already announced plans to open new centers in Atlanta, Scottsdale, AZ, Austin, TX, and Columbus, OH in 2019. (These are currently under construction.) A quick look at the expansion map on the KU site reveals that Houston, Dallas, NYC, and Washington, D.C. are also in the works for 2019.

According to the press release, the new LA, SF, and Chicago locations are in the process of accepting restaurant partners. Each will house between 10 and 15 restaurant brands.

Beyond Meat Targets Hardbodies with Trifecta Meal Delivery Partnership

Beyond Meat is branching out from grocery stores and restaurants and into a new retail channel — one geared towards all you fitness nuts out there. The plant-based meat company announced today that it will offer its products through healthy, organic meal delivery service Trifecta.

Trifecta offers pre-made healthy meals and also à la carte mains and sides, like flat iron steak and quinoa. As of now Beyond’s burgers are only available à la carte, but Trifecta announced over Instagram that they would soon be adding Beyond products to their pre-selected vegetarian and vegan meal plans.

Though Beyond is already in a boatload of retailers and restaurants around the world, this partnership is the first time that their prepared plant-based products will be available through a delivery service. And I’ve got to say, Trifecta is a pretty interesting choice of partner on Beyond’s part.

Trifecta is geared towards hardcore healthy people who are eating to lose weight or do some serious muscling up. It offers meal plans like Keto, Paleo, and Clean, all of which are gluten- and dairy-free. The Trifecta site even has before and after photos. Basically, it’s meal delivery for hardbodies — or aspiring hardbodies.

Trifecta’s meals are also on the pricier side. The plans start at $109 per week, which gets you seven meals of your choice (breakfast, lunch, dinner, or something called “third entree”). Prices go down as you bundle more meals together.

That shakes out to roughly $15 per meal, which is more expensive than pretty much all of the major meal kit companies out there. Then again, Trifecta’s meals put emphasis on lots of protein, so that explains the high cost.

The Beyond Burger is available in Trifecta’s à la carte section for $23.49 a week, which includes 7 servings. The patties are delivered pre-cooked, which, to me, seems to make the whole point kind of moot. Beyond Meat retails for $5.99 for two patties, which are ready to eat and just have to be heated in a pan. If you’re buying them pre-cooked from Trifecta not only is it more expensive, but since you still have to reheat them you’re basically guaranteeing a rubbery, overcooked burger. But people will pay a high price for convenience.

I was initially pretty surprised to read about this partnership. Why was Beyond Meat, whose whole raison d’etre is to make eating plant-based meat tasty and accessible, partnering with a company that’s all about carefully monitored fats, healthy carbs, and protein?

But then I thought about it for five seconds and realized that it actually makes a lot of sense for Beyond to work with Trifecta. It shows that they’re a serious source of protein fit even for a bodybuilder. Or, you know, Shaquille O’Neill. On Trifecta’s part, adding Beyond Meat to the menu is a smart, easy way to feed the growing demand for plant-based protein.

As Beyond Meat prepares to go public later this year — and continues to compete with other alterna-meat producers like Impossible Foods, who’s heading into retail — they’re smart to branch out into as many markets and distribution channels as possible. We’ll see if the company can bulk up their IPO as much as they can bulk up bodybuilders.

Revenue, Customer Counts and Cloud Kitchens: Some Uber Eats Takeaways from Uber’s IPO Prospectus

Uber unveiled its S-1 financials document as part of its impending IPO today. While most of the headline-grabbing numbers were around the company’s potential $100 billion valuation and the $1.8 billion in losses in 2018, we at The Spoon are more interested in what the document says about Uber Eats . So we pulled some tasty nuggets from the prospectus about the food delivery service for you (questions are ours, italics are direct quotes):

Number of people using the Uber Eats
Of the 91 million [Monthly Active Platform Consumers] on our platform, over 15 million received a meal using Uber Eats in the quarter ended December 31, 2018, tapping into our network of more than 220,000 restaurants in over 500 cities globally.

Where is Uber Eats available?
Uber plans to expand Uber Eats from 500 cities to the 700 cities where it currently offers personal mobility services.

How much revenue is Uber Eats generating?
Uber Eats grew to $2.6 billion in Gross Bookings for the quarter ended December 31, 2018, nearly three years following the launch of the Uber Eats app, which we believe makes our Uber Eats offering the largest meal delivery platform in the world outside of China.

Later on in the filing, Uber says that Uber Eats did $7.9 billion in gross booking for the year ending Dec. 31, 2018.

Average delivery time
For the quarter ended December 31, 2018, the average delivery time was approximately 30 minutes.

(Ed. note: time to fire up those delivery drones!)

The halo effect between ridesharing and food delivery
…Uber Eats attracts new consumers to our network – in the quarter ended December 31, 2018, 50% of first-time Uber Eats consumers were new to our platform. Additionally, in the quarter ended December 31, 2018, consumers who used both Personal Mobility and Uber Eats had 11.5 Trips per month on average, compared to 4.9 Trips per month on average for consumers who used a single offering in cities where both Personal Mobility and Uber Eats were offered.

Uber Eats expansion plans
We also plan to explore expanding into new food verticals, such as grocery, and different types of food providers, such as cloud kitchens, to our Uber Eats offering.

With its growth, Uber Eats’ successes are a major part of Uber’s IPO story. But the company faces stiff (and well funded) competition from the likes of GrubHub, DoorDash, Postmates and more (and that’s just in the U.S.). Now we have to wait and see how tasty the street thinks Uber Eats actually is.

Target (Finally) Enters the Shoppable Recipe Game with Cooklist

Yesterday Target announced that it was kicking off a partnership with shoppable recipe startup Cooklist (h/t Dallas News). The retail giant will launch the new service first in 47 Dallas-Fort Worth stores and Target’s delivery service Shipt.

The Dallas-based Cooklist is a mobile app that lets people search from the million-plus recipes in its database, select their favorite, then compare prices and order the ingredients for either pickup or same-day delivery from nearby participating grocery stores. The app also keeps track of what groceries you have in your house and helps remind you when food is about to expire.

As of now the app can generate shopping lists of goods from 81 national grocery chains, but only offers grocery delivery through Target.

Cooklist’s partnership with Target isn’t exactly surprising. Last July the startup announced that it had raised a $250,000 “pre-seed” round, half of which came from the Techstars Retail Accelerator in Minneapolis. As part of the membership, Cooklist got office space at the Target HQ.

This is Target’s second shoppable recipe partnership announcement in as many days. Earlier today, guided cooking platform Innit revealed new shoppable recipe capabilities that basically let users create their own individualized meal kits(ish) and pick them up or order them for delivery from more than 30 retailers, including Target.

However, “Tarjay” has some catching up to do: Walmart and Albertsons/Safeway have been working with shoppable recipe platform Myxx for months, and Amazon Fresh has a whole bevvy of shoppable recipe partnerships with Fexy Media, Whisk, and SideChef.

It’s no secret that grocery competition is heating up, with retailers big and small trying to find ways to get you your goods list faster, cheaper, and more conveniently. Compared to some of its competitors, Target’s recent dive into the deep end of shoppable recipes is definitely on the later side — but I don’t think that’s a dealbreaker. The entire space is pretty young with lots of room for growth. With two partnerships in two days, Target shows that it’s taking shoppable recipes seriously.

New Feature Lets Instacart’s Shoppers Immediately Cashout Money Earned

Instacart is reportedly set to announce a new feature tomorrow that allows shoppers (the Instacart workers who go into the stores on behalf of customers) to have immediate access to money they’ve earned, rather than having to wait a week to get paid.

We say “set to announce” because it looks like TechCrunch published an embargoed story today, a day before Instacart was going to announce the new feature. But enough inside baseball. The new option is called Instant Cashout, and it was created in partnership with payment processor, Stripe. With Cashout, Instacart’s shoppers can choose to have the money they earn transferred immediately to a debit card rather than waiting for their payment. Cashout will be available at first in Boston, MA and Bend, OR, and will reach all shoppers by June 2019.

As TechCrunch points out, the move comes after a tumultuous time in labor relations between Instacart and the workers it brings on as shoppers. The delivery startup had to reverse an earlier policy that counted tips towards base wages, and prior to that in 2017, Instacart settled a class action lawsuit over how it classified its shoppers.

Instant payment isn’t a new concept, however, and Instacart is behind the times compared with other gig economy startups like Uber, Lyft and Postmates, which already offer a similar feature. Outside of startupland, a company called (appropriately enough) Instant, helps restaurants like McDonald’s (franchisees) and Outback Steakhouse create a daily paycheck plan for their employees.

Instacart has raised nearly $2 billion dollars, and being so tight-fisted with money earned by the workers on the front line of its service isn’t a good look. This is especially true as the delivery space gets more heated. DoorDash is delivering groceries, Postmates has an IPO planned and grocers like Kroger are testing self-driving cars, which would eliminate the need for a delivery person at all.

If Instacart wants to stay competitive, it’s going to have to make working there competitive as well. Instant cashout a lets puts the company on par with its rivals.

You’ll Soon Be Able to Order Domino’s Pizza From Your Car

Domino’s announced this morning it will launch its Anyware digital-ordering platform in cars in 2019. To do so, the pizza chain-turned-tech trailblazer has teamed up with Xevo, whose in-vehicle commerce technology is currently in about 25 million cars.

This is actually not the first time the Anyware platform has made its way into a car. In 2014, Domino’s worked with Ford Motors to bring voice order to the Ford Sync vehicle. That initiative was slurped up into Anyware when the latter launched in 2015 and is still available today.

With the new in-car app, customers use the car’s touchscreen to find their local store, order, and track the pizza. Voice-ordering will also be available. According to a press release, the feature will be automatically loaded onto cars with Xevo platform starting “in late 2019.” While the release didn’t state which car brands this includes, Xevo already works with Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC, so I’d expect models from those companies to be on the list. Xevo also partnered with Hyundai in 2018 to allow customers to order and pay for meals from Applebee’s, so this isn’t its first go at a QSR partnership.

For Domino’s, the Xevo partnership seems like another stop on Domino’s quest to seemingly try out every new technology it possibly can for delivering pizzas. The list of channels from which Domino’s customer can use the Anyware platform keeps growing: phones, smart watches, TVs, Alexa and Google Home devices, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Domino’s own Zero Click app. The chain also delivers to HotSpots, which are “non-traditional” locations like beaches, parks, and probably even the zoo. And Domino’s launched a separate partnership with global addressing platform what3words earlier this year, to use the latter’s technology in countries and regions that lack a more straightforward address system.

At one point, Domino’s was the only pizza chain around trying out new technologies left and right, but times have changed. Pizza Hut recently partnered with FedEx to use its autonomous bot to deliver pizzas, and even has some weirder projects in the works, like the autonomous pizza factory on wheels the company unveiled in 2018. (It’s still a prototype.) Papa John’s, who has weathered a good deal of trouble in the last year, got a $200 million investment in February. The company hasn’t said yet what the money will go towards, but if it wants to keep up, a little tech innovation will probably be part of its plans.

The only bummer about the Domino’s-Xevo deal is that you still have to either pick the pizza up at a store or get home by the time the pie arrives. My guess is that will change quickly, and Domino’s will either integrate its HotSpots into car ordering or even use the what3words’ tech. You have to figure that, with its many tech initiatives and a platform called Anyware, Domino’s is aiming to eventually deliver everywhere.