• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Skip to navigation
Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Connect
    • Custom Events
    • Slack
    • RSS
    • Send us a Tip
  • Advertise
  • Consulting
  • About
The Spoon
  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Events
  • Advertise
  • About

delivery

July 27, 2021

Delivery Hero’s Sustainable Packaging Program to Provide Restaurants With Eco-Friendly To-Go Containers

Delivery Hero today launched its Sustainable Packaging Program that gives restaurants on its platform more eco-friendly options for their to-go orders. The concept is currently piloting in Austria, Chile, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Qatar, and Singapore. Delivery Hero said in today’s announcement that it will expand the program to other markets in the near future.

The company will deploy 10 million units of “sustainable packaging” by the end of 2022. Specifically, that means providing packaging that’s either fully plant based or plastic alternatives that are free of perfluoroalkoxy-alkanes (PFAS), the manmade chemicals frequently used to make grease- and liquid-resistant packaging. 

For its eco-friendly packaging, Delivery Hero is collaborating with Eco-Products and BIO-LUTIONS on various products including boxes, compartment containers, salad bowls, soup bowls, and sauce containers. (Delivery Hero invested in BIO-LUTIONS in 2019.) These will, according to the company, be available to restaurants on the Delivery Hero platform at “affordable pricing.” 

Several efforts over the last year or so have seen restaurants and restaurant-related companies address the industry’s packaging (aka trash) problem. Major QSRs like McDonald’s and Burger King have both piloted reusable container programs, while parts of the U.S. have companies like DeliverZero, which works with restaurants to bring reusable containers to the delivery process.

Delivery Hero’s news is notable because up to now, no major delivery service has announced plans to actually take over the responsibility of finding and providing eco-friendly packaging. Normally, this task is up to the restaurants themselves. Especially given the last year, many smaller businesses do not have access to affordable options that aren’t mainstream plastics. Delivery Hero, meanwhile, operates 13 subsidiaries, in addition to its name brand, all over the world, so its potential impact could be huge. Company co-founder and CEO Niklas Östberg said in a statement today that the Sustainable Packaging Program “aspires to pave the way for the industry and deliver a more climate friendly service for customers and communities around the world.”

The program follows the company’s earlier announcement of becoming carbon neutral by the end of 2021. 

If you want to learn more about Delivery Hero and other happenings in the restaurant world, join The Spoon on August 17 for a virtual Restaurant Tech Summit. The day-long event will discuss the digitization of the restaurant industry and what that means for its players. Grab a ticket here, and come ready to ask some questions.

July 20, 2021

Delivery Service Swiggy Raises $1.25B

Indian delivery service Swiggy has closed a $1.25 billion round of Series J funding led by Softbank Vision Fund 2 and Prosus Ventures, according to TechCrunch. Qatar Investment Authority, Falcon Edge Capital, Amansa Capital, Goldman Sachs, Think Investments and Carmignac participated in the fundraising, as well as existing investors Accel Partners and Wellington Management.

The “heavily oversubscribed” round includes the $800 million the company raised earlier this year. To date, Swiggy has raised $2.9 billion in funding and has a post-money valuation of $5.5 billion.

Like its rival Zomato (who filed to go public in April 2021), Swiggy is best known across India for its restaurant food delivery service. However, Swiggy’s Chief Executive Sriharsha Majety said that this new funding will also help accelerate its non-food categories in addition to traditional restaurant delivery. “I believe the next 10-15 years offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for companies like Swiggy as the Indian middle class expands and our target segment for convenience grows to 500 million users,” he told TC.

In 2020, Swiggy expanded its service to include delivery of grocery, household items, and laundry, among other categories. 

Zomato, too, has branched out beyond restaurant delivery with its Zomato Marketplace that connects restaurant owners with suppliers of non-food items. The company raised $1.3 billion in its IPO recently. 

The move to offer more than just restaurant meals is similar to developments in other parts of the world. A chief example is DoorDash, the U.S.-based company that added grocery services in 2020 and has also since expanded its “dark convenience store” service. Uber has also started offering non-restaurant food delivery.

In addition to the major companies, an entirely new pack of speedy delivery services has emerged and promises basic food and household items in a fraction of the time it takes a restaurant meal to get cooked and delivered.

Speedy delivery has yet to reach India in any major capacity. When it does, it will add yet-more competition to the already uber-competitive Indian delivery market.

July 9, 2021

Gopuff is Hiring to Get Into Ghost Kitchens

It looks like Gopuff, which is best known for ’round the clock, half-hour grocery delivery, is expanding into the ghost kitchen business. According to HNGRY (subscription required), Gopuff is hiring more than 100 cooks, managers in states across the country including Arizona, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania to be a part of its new ghost kitchen endeavor (hat tip to Grocery Dive).

A job description for a Kitchen Associate in Chandler, Arizona on Gopuff’s site reads:

As a member of Gopuff’s new Fresh Food & Local team, the Kitchen Lead role is crucial to contributing to the success of Gopuff Fresh & Local by leading and managing a vertically integrated ghost kitchen.

Ghost kitchens are commercial kitchen facilities without dining rooms that restaurant brands can rent out to create delivery-only concepts. Meal delivery and takeout, of course, have risen in prominence over the past year as the pandemic forced the closure of dining rooms across the country.

Gopuff, which has micro-fulfillment centers in 650 cities in the U.S., raised a whopping $1.5 billion in funding earlier this year and acquired fleet management company RideOS last month. The general thinking at the time of that acquisition was that RideOS would be used as part of its core grocery delivery operations. But as Grocery Dive points out, that same feet management technology could also be used for routing restaurant meal deliveries.

The ghost kitchen space has certainly been a hotbed of activity over the past year with a number of players launching and expanding services. But perhaps what is more interesting about Gopuff’s hiring spree is the latest example of the lines between restaurant, grocery retail and ghost kitchen blurring. DoorDash, which started out as a restaurant delivery service, launched its own ghost kitchen and is expanding further into grocery delivery and expanding it own dark delivery only Dash Mart stores. Walmart is doing virtual food courts via ghost kitchens. And ghost kitchen operator C3 is running ghost kitchens out of hotels and residential spaces.

For Gopuff, adding hot meals to its existing grocery delivery business makes sense, given that it aims to complete deliveries in a half-hour. In that short amount of time your restaurant food arrives hot, while your pint of ice cream stays cool. Now the onus is on Gopuff to communicate clearly what it’s brand proposition is, so people will order both from the company.

June 29, 2021

Local Kitchens Raises $25M for Its Virtual Food Hall Network

Virtual food hall Local Kitchens has raised $25 million in Series A funding roughly one year after launching. The round was led by General Catalyst with participation from existing investors Human Capital and Pear VC. New investors Fifth Wall and Penny Jar Capital also participated. Local Kitchens says this round brings its total funding to $28 million. 

The San Francisco Bay Area-based company was founded by three ex-DoorDash employees in the summer of 2020. There are currently four Local Kitchens locations, all of which are in California: Cupertino, Menlo Park, San Jose, and Lafayette. 

These facilities function as combination ghost kitchen/virtual food halls. Orders from all participating restaurant concepts are cooked under one roof, while customers can order via the Local Kitchens website or onsite at a self-service kiosk. 

One notable feature of Local Kitchens is its ability to offer customers mix-and-match functionality when ordering digitally. In other words, customers can order from multiple different restaurant concepts and bundle them into a single transaction, rather than having to create a separate transaction for each restaurant. Kitchen United uses a similar approach for its ghost kitchens, as does Crave Collective, C3, and the newly opened Helbiz Kitchens.

“Bundling” virtual restaurant concepts together is one of those technological functions that looks simple on the surface but is rather a complicated execution on the back end. Speaking recently with The Spoon, Kitchen United’s Atul Sood explained that this idea is time consuming and expensive from a development perspective, and suggested that we may see more third-party restaurant tech in the future that helps ghost kitchen facilities integrate this feature. 

For Local Kitchens right now, customers can only order meals for pickup, though the company says delivery is “coming soon.” It is yet unclear who will delivery the food: a third-party service like DoorDash or an in-house operation. Up to now, the default delivery method has been third-party services. Lately, though, more ghost kitchen facilities have started using their own fleets, and Local Kitchens currently has an open position for Delivery Driver on its jobs website. 

The company says the new funding will allow it to build out more locations in California and eventually expand beyond its home state. 

June 28, 2021

Grab Launched AHBOI Robot to Cover Middle-Meter Meal Delivery in a Singapore Mall

We’ve covered “middle mile” deliveries before, but a new robot in Singapore is covering what we’ll dub the “middle meter.” Last week, Singapore-based delivery service Grab launched its AHBOI robot at the Payar Lebar Quarters (PLQ) mall to speed up delivery orders placed at the restaurants located inside the shopping center.

AHBOI, which stands for Autonomous Handling and Batching Operating Intelligence, is a large, green rectangular mobile locker that acts as a food expediter. According to a Grab corporate blog post, the AHBOI collects delivery orders from different restaurants inside the mall and autonomously brings them to a central collection point where delivery drivers pick them up for the last mile delivery.

I am AHBOI

By shuttling food from restaurants across these middle meters to central pickup point, Grab says it can shave as much as 15 minutes off of a delivery time because the delivery driver doesn’t need to navigate their way to and inside the mall.

We are starting to see more automation appear over the middle meters and miles for food delivery. QSRs like Burger King and McDonald’s are eyeing conveyor belts at restaurants to speed up the movement of food from the kitchen to drive-thru customers. And companies like Valqari are setting up smart lockers where drones can drop off meals at a central location for delivery drivers or customers to pick up from. Using robots to consolidate orders in a large indoor setting like a mall makes a lot of sense.

As part of its blog post, Grab encouraged users to place more orders from the mall that would use AHBOI. The idea being that the more the robot traverses PLQ, the more AHBOI will learn about its environment and the better the robot will get at driving itself around the mall. Of course, more orders also means more revenue for Grab, which they could use to make more robots.

June 25, 2021

‘Store-Hailing’ Startup Robomart Launches Fleet of Mobile Mini-marts in West Hollywood

“Store-hailing” startup Robomart announced today that they are launching their first fleet of mobile mini-marts in West Hollywood, California.

The new store fleet is initially made up of two types: Pharmacy Robomart and Snacks Robomart. The mobile pharmacy version will sell items such as shampoo, batteries, condoms, and Ibuprofen, while the Snacks Robomart will feature chips, candy, sodas, and other snacks. Robomart is also developing a Grocery version that will include fresh fruits and vegetables and other refrigerated items. According to the release, the company says it also has plans “to expand its fleet to include the Pantry, Deli, and Café Robomarts in coming months.”

Robomart customers don’t shop on the app as with other delivery services. Instead, after hailing a Robomart with the app, customers select from the roughly 40-50 different products after the store arrives. Once the customer chooses the items they want, their total is calculated using RFID tags, their credit card is automatically charged, and a receipt is available via the app. The company is working with vehicle fleet provider Zeeba and Avery Dennison for its RFID tag technology.

How much does it cost to shop at a Robomart? Robomart charges a hailing fee of $2 per customer visit and says pricing for products is the same as “in-store” — which probably means typical 7-11 or other convenience store pricing. No tipping is required. All this seems reasonable but makes me wonder how the company will make enough money over time on $2 hailing fees and convenience store markups.

When Robomart launched at CES in 2018, the original pitch featured mobile mini-marts that were fully autonomous. Since then, the company has adjusted to today’s regulatory and technical reality and launched its first fleet to include human drivers. The driver, however, does not interact with the consumer.

And according to Robomart CEO and cofounder Ali Ahmed, the company still envisions a future that includes fully autonomous vehicles and has already built a prototype. “We built a driverless Robomart to showcase our vision of the future,” Ahmed told me. “We plan to add more driverless vehicles to our fleet in the coming years as regulation catches up.”

As part of the announcement, Robomart also said they are working with REEF to provide inventory management and restocking services. Spoon readers may know about REEF for the ghost kitchens they operate in their regional parking lot-centered logistic hubs. In addition, REEF’s Light Speed division will be the first merchant selling products through Robomart.

While Ahmed didn’t say where his company plans to go next, they hope to replicate the model they’ve built with REEF as their replenishment partner in new cities.

“We’re really excited about the partnership with Reef, ” Ahmed told me. “They have set up the station in our first operating zone and are managing supply, inventory, and restocking. We see ourselves replicating this model and playbook with Reef for every major city.”

June 25, 2021

San Francisco Makes Restaurant Fee Caps for Delivery Services Permanent

San Francisco, California voted this week to permanently cap the fees delivery services charge restaurants at 15 percent. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution. 

The 15 percent fee cap was first introduced in April 2020, when Mayor London Breed issued an emergency order that dictated the limits of what third-party delivery services like DoorDash could charge restaurants in commission fees. The cap was in response to a two-fold problem. Historically, delivery services have charged restaurants (in S.F. and everywhere else) commission fees that can run as high as 30 percent per transaction for being on their marketplaces. Said fees became even more problematic once the COVID-19 pandemic shut cities down and restaurants were left with no way to reach customers save through these delivery platforms.

The original fee cap was set to expire on August 15, 60 days after restaurants were allowed to reopen dining rooms at 100 percent capacity. The new resolution will permanently cap commission fees at 15 percent. 

This week’s resolution marks the first time ever a city has passed a permanent cap on commission fees. Certain amendments are still up in the air, including one that would allow delivery services to charge “marketing fees.”

It’s also unclear how this resolution will change existing moves by delivery services, which have already introduced initiatives that look to be their own answer to the commission fee debate. Most notably, DoorDash introduced tiered commission plans in April that start with commission fees at 15 percent. However, that tier covers only the smallest delivery radius and has the highest cost to customers, who would ultimately have to shoulder the cost burden. 

DoorDash and others have said these fee caps ultimately lower order volumes and hurt the drivers and couriers doing the last mile of food delivery, and that fee caps in certain markets mean customers will wind up paying more for their food.

San Francisco was one of the early movers when it came to capping fees. Dozens of other cities followed, though the cap percentage varies from 5 percent (Chicago) up to 20 percent (NYC). Many of those caps have now expired, though NYC is also considering a permanent cap.

June 21, 2021

Grubhub and Resorts World Las Vegas Partner on New Hotel Concept

Resorts World Las Vegas has announced a partnership with Grubhub for a new mobile order service. Guests of the forthcoming Resorts World Las Vegas property will be able to use the service to get food, drinks, and retail items for delivery and pickup during their stay.

Dubbed On The Fly at Resorts World Powered by Grubhub, the service lets guests order from all of the resort’s onsite food and beverage locations as well as certain retail stores. Items can be scheduled for pickup or delivered to the guest’s hotel room or the resort’s pool complex.

To use the service, Resorts World guests either access the Grubhub app or scan one of the many QR codes that will be located throughout the property. Users will also get the option to charge the purchase to their room, just as they would with a traditional room service order, or use their credit card. For poolside deliveries, guests access their order at a QR-code activated restaurant locker on the pool deck. 

The 88-acre Resorts World Las Vegas property will include three Hilton hotel brands in addition to the usual trappings of a Las Vegas property — casino, stores, restaurants, etc. The whole thing is slated to open this week, on June 24. 

It also marks the first time Grubhub’s service has been available at a hotel/casino property. The sheer size of Resorts World Las Vegas — three hotels and 40 food/bev outlets in an 88-acre property — gives Grubhub automatic access to a potentially huge customer base in Sin City. 

Last week, Netherlands-based Just Eat Takeaway.com said it had completed its acquisition of Grubhub, a $7.3 million all-stock deal that was originally announced one year ago. Currently, Grubhub’s strongest markets are New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. 

June 15, 2021

Deliveroo Is Running a Reusable Container Program in Paris

Deliveroo France and circular-packaging company barePack have started offering customers of the delivery service the option to get their food delivered in reusable containers, according to a report from Green Queen. Around 60 of Deliveroo’s restaurant partners are already participants in the program, which is live in Paris with plans to expand to other areas of France in the future. The program is also available to customers in the London area.

Deliveroo and Singapore-based barePack first partnered in 2020 to bring the reusable container option to customers in that city-state.

The Paris deal is similar. Deliveroo customers wanting their meals in reusable containers must first download the barePack app and sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription, which go for about $2.43 and $23 USD, respectively. The barePack app will provide a passcode users can enter into their Deliveroo account that then allows them to select the barePack option from participating restaurants at no additional charge. 

Customers can return containers to any restaurant participating in the Deliveroo-barePack Paris program. All containers are professionally washed and returned to the circular system. 

Deliveroo is the first major delivery service to offer a program for reusable containers. While 60 restaurants in a single city is only the smallest of dents, it’s nonetheless a dent in the world’s restaurant trash problem. If the Paris program is successful, it could bode well for reusables throughout the rest of Europe, where serves multiple countries, including the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and its home country, the U.K. The company also operates in Australia, Hong Kong, Kuwait, and the UAE. 

No delivery service in the U.S. has yet to implement a widespread reusables program, though the hope is that a company as large as Deliveroo could wield a certain amount of influence over others. DeliverZero is a smaller operation that offers reusable packaging in parts of the U.S., and Dishcraft offers its own “containers as a service” program for restaurants. Some chains, including McDonald’s and Burger King, are working with TerraCycle’s circular packaging business Loop in the U.S. and elsewhere.

June 14, 2021

Dishpatch Raises £10M for ‘Finish at Home’ Meal Delivery Service

Dishpatch, a finish-at-home meal kit service based in the U.K., has raised £10 million (~$14 million USD) in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and LocalGlobe, who co-led the round. Other participants to the round include Stride, Entree Capital, Entrepreneur First, and several angel investors.

The Dishpatch service is a cross between a meal kit company and a restaurant delivery service. The company works with local restaurants to offer consumers a pick of weekly meals that are delivered on Fridays. All food is fully cooked at the restaurant but arrives to customers’ homes cold. Customers themselves handle the final heating and preparation, aided by detailed instructions that accompany that food. 

Dishpatch, which has called itself “the antithesis of Deliveroo,” launched during the pandemic as an in-between option for off-premises restaurant meals that’s not quite restaurant delivery but not a box of raw ingredients a la HelloFresh, either.  

The finish-at-home meal kit concept as a whole became popular in 2020 during the pandemic. For many restaurants, particularly higher end ones, throwing a fully prepped hot meal into a takeout box and handing it over to a delivery courier was less than ideal. However, with dining rooms closed for the majority of 2020, businesses had to make revenue from other channels. Finish-at-home meal kits provided a way for restaurants to participate in delivery without compromising the integrity of their food concepts. Many of the restaurants now on Dishpatch’s platform started working with the company, which was founded in 2020, for exactly this reason. 

Dishpatch currently has 25 restaurant signed to its platform that delivery to the London area — over 50 miles from the city center in some cases. Funds from this seed round will allow 20 more restaurants to join the by the end of the year. The company will also further develop its tech, marketing, distribution, and customer service.  

June 9, 2021

JustKitchen Raising $20M, Expanding into the U.S., Asia

Vancouver, Canada-headquartered JustKitchen announced this week it is in the process of raising $20 million to expand its network of ghost kitchens and virtual restaurant brands. The company said it is getting $16 million from Canadian investment dealerr Beacon Securities Limited, which will buy 11.9 million shares of JustKitchen at $1.35 per share. JustKitchen is also looking to raise an additional $4 million.

The company has a number of plans for this new funding, including international expansion, more software development, and some brand acquisition, too.  

JustKitchen operates what it calls “hub-and-spoke” commercial kitchens. Ingredients are prepped in a central main kitchen (the “hub”) and sent to smaller “spoke” kitchens located strategically close to customers. Once a user places an order via the JustKitchens app or website, the spoke kitchen closest to that person completes the order and a delivery service shuttles the meal to its final destination. 

This version of the hub-and-spoke model isn’t widely used at the moment, with most ghost kitchen providers operating traditional commissaries a la Kitchen United or restaurants utilizing space on their own properties. However, the definition of “ghost kitchen” no longer just applies to restaurant food. Another Canadian company, just called Ghost Kitchen, is a good example of this: Ghost Kitchen sells some easy-to-assemble restaurant food, but it also sells pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and packages of Beyond burgers. These simpler types of orders that require minimal prep lend themselves to smaller, spoke-like kitchens closer to customers and powered by a main central kitchen.

In addition to working with third-party restaurant partners, JustKitchen also operates a portfolio of in-house delivery-only restaurants. The company also offers a delivery-only grocery service called JustMarket. Users can add grocery items onto their restaurant meal orders or simply get groceries delivered directly. 

Though based in Vancouver, the company currently only operates its services in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Part of the new funding will go towards opening new spoke kitchens in Taiwan. There are also plans to expand into the western half of the U.S. and into other Asian countries later this year, including Singapore and the Philippines. In the U.S., JustKitchen will begin in Seattle, Washington and several cities in California.

June 9, 2021

DoorDash Expands to Japan

DoorDash today announced the official launch of its delivery service in Japan. This is the San Francisco-based company’s first foray into the Asia market, and its third international expansion after Canada and Australia. 

Service begins today in Sendai, a city with just over 1 million inhabitants in the northeastern part of Japan. The choice of location is in keeping with DoorDash’s strategy elsewhere, which is to focus on smaller cities and suburban markets over major metropolises. Historically, this has helped DoorDash reach customers normally outside most restaurants’ delivery ranges, and it’s arguably a factor that has kept DoorDash in the top spot for marketshare, at least here in the U.S.

Whether the company can repeat that success in Japan remains to be seen. Japan is a restaurant-dense country, which means plenty of prospective DoorDash merchants and customers. However, the country is also home to a lot of competition in the delivery space, including major services like Uber Eats and Delivery Hero.

DoorDash, meanwhile, has recently added services like grocery and convenience store delivery as a way of reaching new customer types and also standing out from the competition. (Uber also offers grocery delivery in some U.S. locations.) The company has not yet said if these services will be immediately part of its expansion to Japan. 

DoorDash went public at the end of 2020. Last month, the company reported revenues of $1.08 billion for the first quarter of 2021, up from $362 million in the previous year and beating out Wall Street estimates.

Restaurants in Sendai will also be able to use DoorDash’s Storefront feature, which lets businesses process orders and payments directly, rather than going through the marketplace. 

Previous
Next

Primary Sidebar

Footer

  • About
  • Sponsor the Spoon
  • The Spoon Events
  • Spoon Plus

© 2016–2025 The Spoon. All rights reserved.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
 

Loading Comments...