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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

delivery

FoodBoss, the Price/Time Comparison Tool for Food Delivery, Raises $2M

This week FoodBoss, the food delivery search engine formerly known as Bootler, announced that it had raised over $2 million in funding. The venture round was led by Cleveland Avenue, a food-focused VC firm founded by the former CEO of McDonald’s, Don Thompson.

Founded in 2016, the Chicago-based startup is basically an aggregator of food delivery services. Users can go to the FoodBoss website or its mobile app and search through various delivery options, like Uber Eats and Caviar, to determine which will deliver food fastest and with the smallest delivery fee. As ChicagoInno points out, this makes the company essentially Kayak for food delivery.

Hungry deal-seekers can either enter their address or search by restaurant name or cuisine (e.g. “McDonald’s” or “Indian food”) and FoodBoss will aggregate all available information on price and live estimated wait time from delivery services to find the “best” deal. It doesn’t just list third-party delivery services (Caviar, etc.), but also restaurants that have their own internal ordering and delivery.

Screenshot from FoodBoss website.

FoodBoss currently serves roughly 50 cities and aggregates info from over 50,000 restaurants. According to a company blog post, FoodBoss will use the new funds to expand to more cities.

With so many third-party food delivery services out there, a company like FoodBoss makes a lot of sense. People don’t have any loyalty to a particular food delivery company (yet), like they might to a certain local restaurant or fast-food chain (Chipotle 4 lyfe).

However, there are a couple of risks and downsides with FoodBoss’ business model. First of all, the company currently only has partnerships with four food delivery services: UberEats, Postmates, Caviar, and Delivery.com. That leaves out significant players like DoorDash, Grubhub, and smaller local food delivery services (e.g. Waitr), meaning that users aren’t getting a complete picture of every possible option before they order.

FoodBoss is also reliant on its delivery service partners for its data. So while the company might be able to aggregate freely from participating third-party delivery sites now, if UberEats doesn’t like their rankings and cuts them off down the road, FoodBoss could lose their relevance fast.

But for now, FoodBoss makes it easier to choose which service will save you a few precious dollars and minutes. Which, admittedly, is a super first-world thing to think about. But as food delivery becomes more and more omnipresent, those dollars and minutes could add up.

Plant-Based Meal Delivery Co. Veestro Expands, Rolls out 100% Recyclable Packaging

Plant-based meal delivery service Veestro is going green(er). This week the California-based company announced that it has expanded shipping operations and, consequently, will now be offering 100 percent curbside recyclable packaging.

Founded in 2013, Veestro makes vegan frozen meals — think Red Curry Tofu and Chik’n Quesadillas — and ships them directly to consumers’ doorsteps. As of this week it can get to said doorsteps a lot more quickly. The company has begun shipping from its new East Coast distribution center in Delaware (their other center is in L.A.), which means it can now ship its meals to anywhere in the U.S. and have them arrive in under three days.

In addition to expanding Veestro’s production capacity, this new manufacturing facility allowed the company to make the shift to 100 percent recyclable packaging. The company already used compostable carton trays and recyclable plastic pouches for its meals, but now with faster shipping times it’s able to switch over to insulation that can be recycled curbside.

That’s kind of a big deal. Most if not all meal/meal kit delivery services come with a hefty serving of insulation and ice packs to keep your fresh food cold on its journey. While that insulation might technically be recyclable, it often includes a lot of extra steps. Sometimes it even has to be driven to a separate pickup facility. All of which means those cold gel packs and styrofoam insulations typically just end up getting tossed in the trash, and end up in a landfill.

Veestro specifically is capitalizing off of two major food trends we’ve seen a lot of as of late: frozen food and plant-based eating. It’s no secret that demand for plant-based food options — especially convenient ones — is on the rise. By offering frozen meals, Veestro can provide that convenience. It also allows the company to circumnavigate a few of the hurdles meal kit companies are struggling with: it puts food on the table faster (with no prep time), and gives them the flexibility to eat whichever meal they want, when they want. No being locked into having to prepare a specific dish on a specific day.

Veestro isn’t the only company capitalizing on the added flexibility that comes with frozen food. Belgian-based Mealhero sells frozen meal components, though you need its countertop steamer in order to cook them. And high-end frozen pre-prepped meals from the likes of Daily Harvest, Zoni Foods and more are bringing about a frozen food Renaissance. In fact, my colleague Chris predicted that the future of quick meals (and meal kits) just might be frozen.

A pack of 10 Veestro meals will set you back $11.70 per single-serving meal, which isn’t exactly cheap — especially when compared to supermarket frozen meals or vegan meal kit company Purple Carrot. However, since they’re opening up a second fulfillment center, it seems like demand is growing for Veestro’s plant-based meals. Now we’ll see if its new packaging initiative will bring in more green for the company.

Will Your Amazon Retrieval Robot Pick Up Your Groceries from the Amazon Store?

There’s a scene in Being John Malkovich where the titular character crawls through a portal inside his own head. The result is a crazy world filled with “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich” ad infinitum.

That’s kind of how I feel whenever I write about Amazon: the company is everywhere, launching so many things. Now comes word from The Wall Street Journal that Amazon is planning on launching “dozens” of its own grocery stores. These aren’t new Whole Foods locations; they would be Amazon grocery stores.

It’s important to note that this idea could never come to fruition. It’s based on “people familiar with the matter” and Amazon tries a lot of things, some of them stick, some Dash, err, don’t. There could any number of reasons for Amazon to launch its own grocery stores — if it’s one thing Amazon likes, it’s control — but let’s assume that Amazon grocery stores are going to happen and spend our Sunday morning doing a quick thought experiment to tie some Amazon threads together.

This may border on red-string conspiracy, but here are some things that we know so far:

  • Amazon’s raison d’etre is to remove friction from the shopping experience. Two-day shipping, voice shopping, in-trunk delivery, in-garage delivery, in-home delivery. All aim to get you your packages faster, so you subsequently buy more stuff.
  • As The Journal notes, Whole Foods doesn’t carry foods with artificial colors, sweeteners, preservatives or stuff like that. Ever tried to buy a plain ole can of Coke at Whole Foods?
  • While Amazon killed off the plastic Dash buttons last week, the company still has its Dash Replenishment system and virtual Dash buttons to facilitate easier restocking of household items.
  • Amazon has been learning how to do brick and mortar retail. It operates a number of Amazon store locations, has owned Whole Foods for a year and a half, and is rapidly expanding it’s Amazon Go Stores. Amazon Go locations in particular are interesting because Amazon builds them from the ground up to do cashierless checkout.
  • Amazon has gotten into the robot delivery business with the launch of its Scout.
  • The Spoon uncovered a patent that was issued to Amazon for an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV). Unlike other delivery robots, this robot would live in your garage (or whatever) and venture out to get your packages from a nearby delivery truck or some other fulfillment type mechanism.
  • Amazon invested in Plant Prefab, a company that makes prefab houses.

Wow. Amazon does have a lot going on. So let’s bring all this together.

The Journal reports that Amazon is eyeing locations that are 35,000 sq. feet for its new stores — half the size of a normal grocery store. If Amazon builds out its own locations it can carry whatever junk it wants, thereby not sullying the Whole Foods brand. But more importantly, with only half the square footage, the Amazon store could carry only the junk you want. Well, you and your neighbors. Amazon’s algorithms will be able to predict what items a particular area wants and how much of it and stock just that.

Building out its own half-sized stores would also make it easier for Amazon to architect them from the ground up to be cashierless. And since they are bigger than a Go store, they could hold more items and better serve as a type of delivery fulfillment center.

And that fulfillment center option is handy because if you, the shopper, don’t want to go to the store, no worries! You can order groceries online for delivery or pickup. And thanks to Alexa and/or Dash, Amazon at some point will know what groceries you need and when and can either dispatch a Scout robot to you, or call your AGV to come retrieve your groceries from the delivery vans making its rounds.

Who knows, perhaps Amazon is gaining enough building knowledge from Plant Prefab to make a sort of doggie door for your AGV, which would finally get Amazon deliveries inside your house.

On a long enough timeline, it’s easy to imagine Amazon doing anything (lord knows what they are working on that we don’t know about yet). But more immediately, it has all the pieces in place to make the notion of its own grocery stores more compelling than just another place to buy your bag of groceries. Perhaps they’d be the kind of place John Malkovich likes to shop.

Cracker Barrel Ramps Up Delivery Efforts, Off-Premises Ordering

Cracker Barrel announced on its earnings call this week the “continued expansion of [its] off-premise business.” In particular, that includes expanding its catering business and also ramping up its efforts around third-party delivery.

The Lebanon, TN-based chain might be a fixture along highway exits across the country, but where off-premises ordering is concerned, it’s been slow to adopt, having only recently started testing a third-party delivery program in a few locations. Tests are reportedly “going well,” and Cracker Barrel is looking to roll out delivery to about 170 stores over the next few months, and have third-party delivery available in 400 of Cracker Barrel’s 650-plus locations.

The company is also adjusting its menu to accommodate off-premises, and Cracker Barrel says it hopes its new bone-in fried chicken offering will boost orders in this area. As any good southerner knows, fried chicken is best eaten a little while after cooking, not as soon as it leaves the fryer. That makes it an ideal food item in a delivery world where food sits for some minutes as it travels to your house. And as we’ve discussed before, food that gets better with delivery could be a differentiating factor for restaurants as more and more restaurants join the race.

Cracker Barrel has not yet disclosed which services it will partner with when it rolls out its delivery efforts nationwide.

The company also continues to focus on its catering business, which has been in place for years. Off-premises catering is expected to continue growing over the next year, particularly in the B2B catering realm. To meet demand, Cracker Barrel has added catering managers at some locations and is also testing catering-specific items.

The focus on off-premises is part of the Southern food chain’s ongoing plan to bolster lagging sales and fix some operational issues, including increased costs due to construction of new stores, a new POS system, and the new fried chicken, which requires new kitchen equipment. The company reported two consecutive quarters of positive same-store sale growth on this week’s earning’s call, and also noted higher check averages.

As far as delivery is concerned, Cracker Barrel may be onto something with its new fried chicken offering. The company is a little late to the delivery game, compared to other “classic” family chains (Bob Evans, Denny’s, and IHOP all deliver extensively). Experimenting with which foods travel well (chicken) versus those best left on a plate (cooked carrots, IMO), could be one way for the chain to ensure higher quality food that’s worth paying a delivery fee for. Cracker Barrel has a lot of loyal followers and a decent mobile app, but so do a lot of restaurants. Truly good food that keeps its southern roots but translates to the delivery era, on the other hand, could be a game changer.

Coterie Will Deliver a High-End Party-in-a-Box to Your Doorstep

Remember that scene in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” when Willow uses her witch capabilities to instantly transform the house into an Instagram-worthy party setup? Most of us, Buffy lovers or not, wish we had that kind of capability, since planning a party is usually stressful, time consuming, and full of stupid mistakes that cost us money.

Coterie, while it doesn’t use magic, will make a party appear in a box on your doorstep at the click of a button. The nine-month-old startup launched last week after raising $2.75 million in funding, including a pre-seed round from Canaan with participation from Global Founders Capital and Female Founders Fund.

The NYC-based startup’s operation is yet-another example of home delivery services infiltrating as many parts of our lives as it can, from restaurant meals to groceries to cocktails.

Coterie doesn’t deliver any actual food or booze. Rather, the company’s “sets” are all about providing the rest of the party materials you need to eat, decorate, and take ridiculous photos. “The people are what make the party. We’re just here to help you feed them and fete them until the bottles run dry,” the company claims on its website.

With that in mind, the company offers multiple different party sets you can order and have delivered directly to your doorstep. Tell the site how many guests you’re anticipating (you can choose from between 10 and 50 people) and designate whether you want the essentials or a “luxe” package, which adds a few more decorative items, depending on the kit.

According to the Coterie site, the cost of a kit ranges from $86 to about $320, depending on which kit you choose and how many people are attending your soiree.

Kits cover all the main party occasions — baby shower, engagement, birthday — and there are a few multi-purpose ones as well. You can also just purchase items, from candles and balloons to plates photo booth props, a la carte. As a TechCrunch article recently noted, a create-your-own-set feature will be available “in the near future.”

The TechCrunch article also pointed out that, though these kits look like they were tailor-made for Instagram photo ops, VC Laura Chau, who invested in Coterie via her firm, Canaan Partners, says the kits actually make fun of social media. The goal is not to feed on the fake perfection of Instagram but to blow up the idea that such perfection is real.” Chau noted that right now, the online party kit business only has one major legacy player: Party City.

There are actually a number of efforts being made around direct-to-consumer party kits, from Oriental Trading Company to Martha Stewart to this entire page on Etsy dedicated to that category.

Coterie may not want to be the next backdrop for your Instagram feed, but with meticulously curated products that are slightly higher-end than many options, that might actually be in the company’s favor. As anyone who’s thrown a party before knows, you have to have quite a bit of patience and time to get a photo-worthy shindig up and running. Coterie has done a huge part of the work for customers by ensuring everything they need for party supplies is available at a clear cost with the click of a button. Next to having a resident witch at home, that sounds like the best option available when it comes to the daunting task of party planning.

Forget Catering. Shake Shack Ups Its Off-Premises Game With a Food Truck for Rent

Yesterday Shake Shack introduced the world to its new food trucks, available for rental for private events.

To be clear: the Shack Truck doesn’t drive around your city and land at the nearby food truck park come lunchtime. According to the Shack Truck FAQs, it’s instead a vehicle you can rent out for private parties like weddings, anniversaries, birthday bashes, and whatever else you could think to throw a party for.

The menu is determined based on each individual event, but in general you can expect the usual Shake Shack items — burgers, fries, and, of course, shakes. Pricing also varies by event and can be determined once you fill out a form and submit it to the company.

Right now, Shake Shack has two of these trucks: one operating in the tri-state area (NY, NJ, CT, and PA) and one in Atlanta. There’s no word yet on whether the company will have more trucks or more cities available in future, though given Shake Shack’s rapid expansion pace, it’s likely. For now, if you’re in the area, the company suggests booking the truck at least two weeks in advance of your event.

What’s most intriguing about this is not that you can serve Shake Shack at your wedding (although that is pretty amazing news), but that the company has found yet another way to reach audiences outside the traditional standalone restaurant setting. Nearly all of its 200 units currently deliver, and Shake Shack outlets have long been in places like Madison Square Park, Citi Field, and, more recently, casinos like the New York New York hotel in Las Vegas.

A food truck for rent is really just another form of catering, but it’s cleverly branded catering that screams “millennial,” a generation that’s borderline obsessed with off-premises food options. Plus, around 70 percent of customers (millennials or otherwise) are predicted to be ordering offsite by 2020. That means restaurant chains will have to continue to find unique ways of providing those experiences, and a rentable food truck is certainly a good start.

HalfPosh Delivers Half-Portion Meals so You Won’t Feel Overstuffed

I love burritos, but I just wish they weren’t so big. You order one and a sizeable log smothered in (delicious) molé sauce shows up on your plate. It’s great, but it’s just too much, especially at lunchtime, because after I finish it I feel all bloated and unproductive.

This is why startup HalfPosh has created a lunch delivery service that serves only half portions of restaurant meals. “People are more productive when they eat less,” Ema Chuku, Founder of HalfPosh told me by phone. But it’s not just about being able to finish the PowerPoint presentation, with nearly 40 percent of US adults classified as obese, it’s also about being healthy.

Chuku, who previously lived in Italy, was baffled by the size of American meals, and so he started HalfPosh at the end of summer last year with tests in Chicago and LA. He’s had to do some convincing to get restaurants on board with creating what are essentially new menu items. “They always thought it would cost them more,” said Chuku “But it doesn’t really cost them more, it helps them move their product more.” Or, at least, that what’s he’s trying to prove out to them.

In LA, the company’s main base of operations, HalfPosh has 34 restaurant partners, mostly small regional chains, and delivers to the downtown and West LA areas. HalfPosh’s main target audience is freelancers, entrepreneurs and people working from home offices. The company just does lunches, deliverying only from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.

HalfPosh only offers one menu per week, rotating each week. Access to the service itself costs $14.95 a month and there is no delivery fee for orders. From there people can pay as they go, or choose to pre-pay a certain amount, like say $100, and have their order amounts automatically debited as they go. Orders are placed via text messaging system inside the app, with menu items typically costing $7 per meal and food arriving within 45 minutes of ordering. Chuku says the company has 1,500 customers with the average user placing three orders per week.

In and of itself, $7 for a single-serve lunch isn’t cheap, but it seems about right in terms of value and perceived value. If it were much less, people probably would think it was too low and what they’d get for it wouldn’t be substantial.

Right now HalfPosh is self-funded by Chuku, has six employees and a small fleet of electric scooters and an electric Smart car. (Chuku himself does some of the deliveries.)

As someone who works from home, the idea of getting half-portions of restaurant meals delivered to me during the day is intriguing. As noted, not only do I not need to eat a full sit down meal at lunch every day, I also don’t want to throw away (or forget about) the half a burrito I don’t eat, so HalfPosh also seems like a pretty good way to combat food waste as well.

My biggest concern with HalfPosh is that if this concept gains traction, there’s no reason that a larger player couldn’t step in and offer the same thing. The likes of Uber Eats and GrubHub have more customers and therefore more leverage and incentive to get restaurants to either create half-portions of existing menus, or entirely new virtual kitchens that only does lunch and half-portions. Uber and GrubHub also have the logistical know-how, technology and infrastructure to efficiently bunch together a bunch of smaller orders into a single route.

But, there’s also a good chance that the onesie-twosie size of the freelancer/individual market that HalfPosh is going after isn’t on the scale a company like Uber or GrubHub needs in order to make it worth their while.

If you’re in LA and work from home, or just don’t want to eat as much for lunch, and want to try HalfPosh out, we’d love to hear what you think. Drop a comment or send us an email to tell us if it was satisfying, and if you get a burrito, let us know how big it was.

Subscription Models Are the Future of Third-Party Food Delivery

When Postmates started delivering Starbucks back in 2015, the deal came with a glaring drawback: Postmates’ $5.99 delivery fee applied to any order, even if it was a single beverage. While it was fun and novel to try getting a tall latte delivered to the office once, just to say you did, most of us wrote the concept off as impractical and unsustainable.

Times have changed. Coffee delivery with reasonable delivery fees is now a thing, along with smoothies, Big Macs, $1.19 bean burritos, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. That’s thanks to the fact that off-premise sales are now 38 percent of total restaurant sales and growing, and, according to a recent forecast by Technomic, much of the growth comes from the rise of third-party delivery sales.

That makes now the perfect time to rethink delivery fees, and a growing number of companies are now looking to the subscription model.

Think Netflix for food delivery: You sign up for a monthly membership, and in return get unlimited delivery on food in your area. For third-party services, the subscription route offers users competitive pricing options that will (hopefully) keep the diehard delivery fans loyal to the service. In its forecast, Technomic noted that “subscription models that eliminate per-delivery fees in favor of a flat-rate subscription will emerge to present a clearer value proposition to customers.”

As this is a fairly nascent practice, it’s far from perfect at the moment, with restrictions and limitations that could put some people off. But the mere fact that most of the major delivery players now have some presence in the subscription model space suggests it’s an area of delivery we should watch closely over the rest of 2019. Here’s what folks are up to:

DoorDash unveiled its DashPass in August of 2018. For a monthly fee of $9.99 you can order as much delivery from participating restaurants as your heart desires and your pocketbook can manage. In a blog post, DoorDash called out some big-name chains as participants, such as Wendy’s, The Cheesecake Factor, and White Castle, suggesting major restaurants are at least partially on-board with the subscription-style business model.

Right now there are a couple restrictions with DashPass: orders have to be over $15 to qualify for DashPass, and the pass only applies to certain restaurants. For example, I’m writing this post from Nashville, TN, where DoorDash tells me 110 restaurants are available for DashPass, which is hardly the extent of Music City’s culinary landscape.

Postmates offers a similar service, and has done so since 2016. For $10 per month, you can use the Plus Unlimited service for delivery orders over $15. As with DoorDash, the program only applies to those restaurants participating, which limits your options somewhat. Postmates also promises member deals and discounts.

In the UK, Deliveroo rolled out a subscription service last year called Deliveroo Plus. At £7.99/month, it’s a steal for anyone ordering just a few meals per month. (Deliveroo typically charges a £2.50 delivery fee per order.) There’s no order minimum, either, making Deliveroo’s service something like the Amazon Prime of food delivery.

Uber Eats started testing a loyalty program in the UK last year that would potentially do away with delivery fees. Thus far, it hasn’t come Stateside. Grubhub, still the leader in third-party food delivery, hasn’t yet dabbled in subscriptions, either. But I wouldn’t be surprised if either of those two have something in the works.

The key to a successful subscription offering will ultimately lie in how much choice services can offer consumers while still providing a delivery-fee-free package. If that’s pie-in-the-sky thinking at the moment, I doubt it stays that way for long.

SoftBank Expands its Driverless Delivery Empire with $940M Nuro Investment

SoftBank has invested $940 million into driverless vehicle startup Nuro The Wall Street Journal reports. The deal is noteworthy not just for the amount of money involved, but also for the growth it could spur in driverless delivery, as well as how it plays into SoftBank’s portfolio of automated mobility companies.

Nuro makes autonomous, low-speed electric pod-like vehicles that are about half the size of a traditional car. These pods are built from the ground up to carry goods, and there is literally no room for a driver. Since the pods are light, nimble and top out at 25 mph, they could be a safer alternative to full-sized autonomous vehicles and therefore a more attractive option for risk-averse city planners and regulators creating laws around the emerging driverless delivery space.

One has to wonder how the folks at Robomart, which makes similar pod-like vehicles, are feeling today. On the one hand, Robomart is going after a different market, forsaking direct point-to-point delivery in favor of mobile commerce, so they aren’t direct competitors, and SoftBank’s massive money drop is a validation of low-speed vehicles as a technology. But Nuro’s pods are already being tested by grocery giant Kroger to deliver groceries in Arizona, and this cash infusion will help Nuro quickly scale up is engineering, production and business development. Nuro now has the money to invest in and improve its technology and get its platform used by more partners, potentially boxing out Robomart.

But almost more interesting than Nuro’s newfound cash to expand is Softbank as the investor. Over the past year, SoftBank has made a number of bets on mobility and food delivery:

  • SoftBank and Toyota teamed up for a joint venture called MONET, which will create an autonomous vehicle platform for a number of different smart mobility services including food delivery and even mobile food preparation.
  • SoftBank invested $375 million in Zume, which uses vast amounts of data to predict the amount of pizza delivery on any given night, as well as robots to prepare those pizzas, and mobile ovens to heat them just-in-time for delivery.
  • SoftBank is an investor in both DoorDash and Uber Eats, two food delivery services experimenting with self-driving vehicles, robot delivery and perhaps even drone delivery.

With the Nuro investment, SoftBank adds another delivery form factor (low speed pods) to its logistical lineup. With all of these investments that connect goods and consumers, Softbank is setting itself up to be a dominant player in our increasingly self-driving and delivery-filled future.

Postmates Files to Go Public

Delivery service Postmates has confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO). Bloomberg broke the news this morning, followed by an announcement from the company.

Postmates is the first of the major national delivery services to test the public market, beating out rivals like Instacart and DoorDash. All three services have individually raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding: Instacart raised $1.9 billion, DoorDash raised $972 million, and Postmates raised $678 million.

Postmates just snagged $100 million last month, which valued the company at $1.85 billion. The startup will be a bellwether for the rest of the industry: if it pops, then that will clear a path for Instacart and DoorDash to do the same. If it tanks, well… that will make going public that much harder for other food delivery giants.

While we work to remain objective here at The Spoon, we can’t help but be a little excited for a potentially successful Postmates IPO for one reason: it will mean more robots.

For McDonald’s Franchisees, Delivery Is Another Point of Friction In an Ongoing Battle

Despite a drop in guest counts, McDonald’s reported positive global and domestic same-store sales during its Q4 2018 earnings call, which took place this Wednesday, January 30.

Among the many numbers and initiatives discussed, delivery was highlighted during the call as a particularly lucrative area for McDonald’s moving forward. The mega-chain has been delivering since 2017, when it launched a partnership with Uber Eats. According to the call transcript, 19,000 McDonald’s restaurants globally offer delivery, making it a $3 billion business for both international and domestic stores. CEO Steve Easterbook noted the company will make delivery a “high priority” in 2019.

That’s great if you’re in corporate, or if you want a Big Mac delivered to your office or dorm room. For McDonald’s franchisees, however, delivery appears to be yet-another point of tension lumped on top of an already large pile of grievances.

The National Owners Association (NOA), formed in 2018 and representing about 400 McDonald’s franchisees, conducted a survey recently wherein the majority of 800 franchisees surveyed said they were not “satisfied with the economics” of delivery, and want McDonald’s to push for a better commission split with third parties. McDonald’s has a massive partnership with Uber Eats, who takes roughly 30 percent of each transaction.

“We need to have several vendors delivering for us, not just Uber,” on franchisee surveyed said. “Paying rent and service fees on Uber commission is not fair. Delivery is a necessary service these days, but we must be able to do it profitably.”

The other side of that coin, of course, is that multiple delivery services can become overwhelming very quickly because of the many disparate sales channels they add to a restaurant’s ticket stream, not to mention the extra devices. Loads of different software options to streamline these issues exist, but they cost money, and so McDonald’s franchise operators would have to factor in those costs to their idea of “profitability” were McDonald’s to ever welcome other delivery partners.

These recent comments from McDonald’s and franchisees follow on the heels of a year of aggressive initiatives around McDonald’s Experience of the Future store redesigns, which have sparked concern and frustration among franchisees. McDonald’s revamped 4,000 stores in 2018, bringing its total Experience of the Future stores close to 8,000. But the NOA has said these redesign elements don’t necessarily drive competitive sales, and that McDonald’s is launching too many expensive initiatives that don’t pay off.

Kiosks are one such effort. McDonald’s has self-order kiosks in roughly 17,000 McDonald’s restaurants worldwide. But some franchise operators cite them as another area that doesn’t pay off. “What good will new buildings be when we cannot deliver service because we are short-staffed. Employee turnover is at an all-time high for us. Our restaurants are way too stressful, and people do not want to work in them. Kiosks are not the answer,” one operator stated. But on the call, Easterbrook noted that previous trials show how guests adopt the technology over time, indicating they will become more comfortable with the kiosk process as we go along.

Shake Shack is a good example in action of Easterbrook’s statement. The company unveiled a cashless, kiosk-centric store in October 2017 and abandoned the concept less than a year later, due to an influx of customer complaints around those kiosks. But in August of 2018, Shake Shack made an about-face and announced it would expand its kiosk locations (with some adjustments based on customer feedback). The company received much more favorable feedback the second time around.

Meanwhile, McDonald’s has extended the deadline of its Experience of the Future stores, giving operators the option to complete them by 2022, rather than the original date of 2020. Roughly 2,000 stores are expected to be overhauled in 2019 and 2020.

Domino’s Just Made It Even Easier to Deliver Pizza — in Saudi Arabia

If you order Domino’s pizza, your days of relaying special delivery instructions to the driver could soon be over. The pizza chain-turned tech company just announced via a press release it has expanded its partnership with location-technology company what3words to Saudi Arabia.

Domino’s has already been delivering to geographic locations called Hotspots like parks and street corners. The partnership with what3words is a separate initiative (that doesn’t power the Hotspots), and brings a new level of precision to location services and food delivery.

What3words is a global addressing platform that divides the entire world up into a grid of 3m x 3m squares. Its algorithm converts GPS coordinates (the squares) into unique three-word addresses. For example, I typed in an old address of mine and got “fuzzy.data.news.” When I moved the map a few squares over, to be on the street outside, the address became “august.cones.wanted.” According to what3words’ site, every single 3×3 square on earth has a unique three-word name. The algorithm determines the words, so it’s not like a password where companies tell you to choose something you’ll be able to quickly remember. But I doubt I’ll be forgetting “august.cones.wanted” anytime soon.

Saudi Arabia makes sense as a testing ground for this partnership: home and street addresses have historically not been used there. The what3words app instead lets a driver locate the customer’s home by locating the three-word address on a map. This only applies to orders placed over the phone; it’s as-yet not applicable to the Domino’s app.

Domino’s already uses the technology in Sint Maarten, a Caribbean island with notoriously bad traffic and an equally confusing system for house addresses. Previously, Domino’s delivery drivers had to call the customer and ask for turn-by-turn instructions that used mango trees as landmarks.

On the upside, this kind of technology saves both driver and customer time. More time spent looking for an address means fewer deliveries, (h)angrier customers and, for the driver, less money in tips at the end of the day. And for the customer, it broadens the options in terms of where you can get a pizza delivered (park, beach, abandoned warehouse).

Saudi Arabia’s been using what3words for businesses, logistics, and taxis since last year. And what3words is also in London, with courier service Quiqup, and Mercedes-Benz built an in-car navigation system using the technology.

Stateside, Domino’s dropped another announcement on Wednesday: It will track how much pizza you eat and reward you for eating more. And it’s not just Domino’s pizza, it’s all pizza, including those from competitors. Customers download the latest Domino’s app and scan their pizza. Each scan earns 10 points; when a customer reaches 60 points, they get a free medium-sized pizza from Domino’s.

The program, which starts February 2, is an obvious ploy to sell pizzas during the Super Bowl (and collect more data on user preferences and behaviors).

Meanwhile, it seems like only a matter of time before Domino’s brings it what3words partnership to the U.S.