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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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.

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.

Food Tech News: GE’s Latest Kitchen Hub, New Vegan IKEA Meatballs, and Meal Delivery Galore

Happy Saturday! This week was a big one for us at The Spoon — we kicked off our shiny new Future Food newsletter covering all things alternative protein, from plant-based meat to insects to cellular agriculture. Make sure to subscribe here.

But for now, let’s turn to this week’s food tech news. We have stories about IKEA’s new plant-based meatballs, GE’s latest smart kitchen hub, and a new frozen meal delivery service. Enjoy!

Mosaic, a new frozen meal delivery company, launches on East Coast
There’s a new D2C meal delivery service on the scene. This week Mosaic, a company which ships frozen, pre-cooked vegetarian bowls to consumers’ doorsteps within one day, began operations on the East Coast. The bowls range in price from $8.99 to $12.49 which is pretty pricey compared to what you’d find in the freezer section of the grocery store, but on par with traditional meal kits. Mosaic raised a seed round of funding in 2018 and is planning to launch in new cities soon.

Photo: GE

GE’s starts selling new kitchen hub, amps up SideChef partnership
The latest version of GE’s kitchen hub, which made its first appearance at CES this January, is now hitting store shelves (h/t CNET). Priced around $1,199, the hub has a built-in smart touchscreen which includes guided cooking capabilities from SideChef.

In fact, SideChef and GE have been ramping up their partnership lately. Sidechef’s app is now connected to a sizeable 74 GE ovens and ranges, allowing home cooks to set cook times, monitor temperature, and change up the cooking mode on their connected appliances.

Photo: IKEA

IKEA’s making a meatier version of their plant-based meatballs
Vegetarians who love Swedish meatballs, rejoice. The Daily Mail reports that IKEA is developing a new plant-based version of their famous meatballs which will look and taste more like the “real thing.” The Swedish furniture giant launched a vegan meatball made of chickpeas and vegetables back in 2015, but this new version will apparently be more in line with the more realistic offerings from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. IKEA plans to trial their new meatballs in early 2020.

Photo: Wegmans

Wegmans teams up with DoorDash
This week East Coast supermarket chain Wegmans announced that it will partner DoorDash to launch its Wegmans Meals 2GO food delivery service. Hungry people can use the Wegmans Meals 2GO app to order from the Wegmans’ prepared food section, which includes pizza, salads, and sushi. Customers can opt for carry-out or curbside pickup, or can get delivery for orders of $20 or more if they live within a 5 mile radius. So far the service is available in two locations in Rochester, New York and one spot in Virginia, and Wegmans plans to roll out the service to 40 stores by the end of this year.

Did we miss anything? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

DoorDash Launches Kitchens Without Borders to Assist Restaurants Owned by Immigrants and Refugees

With delivery, it’s easy to forget there are human beings behind the food you just ordered with the push of a button. DoorDash wants to change that by reminding us of the stories behind your Tuesday night dinner.

Today the third-party food delivery service announced Kitchens Without Borders, an initiative that supports restaurants founded by immigrants and refugees. The goal is to highlight the entrepreneurs’ stories behind these businesses while also building awareness for what are often resourced-strapped businesses.

Kitchens Without Borders will kick off in the San Francisco Bay Area, DoorDash’s hometown. The service will give 10 immigrant- or refugee-owned restaurants credits for free delivery for up to six weeks, extra marketing and promotional opportunities, increased visibility on the DoorDash site, and a spot in a video mini-series that looks at the backstory of each business. The videos are available on the Kitchens Without Borders website.

The initiative comes at a time when political debate around immigration is hotly debated, and one’s Twitter feed might lead them to believe the American Dream is as dead as the VHS machine. But DoorDash CEO and cofounder Tony Xu clearly believes otherwise: “DoorDash’s mission has always been to connect people with possibility by creating valuable opportunities for entrepreneurs to reach new audiences,” he wrote in a blog post published this morning. “For immigrant communities facing heightened barriers to success, that goal has become even more important — and for me, it’s at the heart of the company’s story.”

Xu himself is an immigrant, having moved to the U.S. from China at age five. Working in his mother’s Chinese restaurant, which she ran in order to save enough money to go become a doctor, Xu “saw firsthand what it takes to make it in this country.”

Now, Xu and DoorDash want to highlight other stories of people working to make it in a country. DoorDash’s first round of Kitchens Without Borders profiles immigrant and refugee entrepreneurs from Chile, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Turkey, Sudan, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Mexico, and Japan, highlighting their backstories as well as relevant business information. Restaurants include Besharam, ZZoul Cafe, Onigilly, LosCilantros, Sabores Del Sur, WestParkFarm&Sea, Little Green Cyclo, Afghan Village, D’Maize, and Sweet LimeThai Cuisine. All restaurants are based in the SF Bay Area.

According to the press release, DoorDash expand Kitchens Without Borders to other cities in future. Given that the third-party delivery service is now in over 3,300 cities across the U.S. and Canada, there are a lot of potential customers out there for the companies chosen. More importantly, there are a lot of opportunities to share with audiences what seems like the real message behind the initiative: that the “American Dream” isn’t dead (regardless of what your newsfeed tells you), and there are a lot of people in this country still working hard to inch closer to it.

Checkers & Rally’s Launch “Franchisee Friendly” Delivery Program

Burger chain Checkers & Rally’s announced via press release a delivery program this week that enables delivery from multiple third parties and is also, according to a company press release, “franchise-friendly.”

To service multiple third-party delivery partners at once, and perhaps also to avoid putting franchises through the kind of franchise McSaga McDonald’s currently finds itself in, Checkers & Rally’s have integrated delivery from five major players into a single point-of-sales system. Customers can order from Uber Eats, DoorDash, Postmates, Grubhub, and Amazon Restaurants, and that order will appear as any other ticket item in the system.

Enabling third-party delivery with multiple partners can and does often create operational issues for restaurants. There’s the pileup of hardware devices that come with using multiple services, often referred to nowadays as “tablet hell.” Plus, multiple new ticket streams from these third-party providers means someone has to key in the different orders from different devices, which would slow even the most well-oiled machine down while simultaneously raising the potential for error.

Checkers & Rally’s sought to avoid these pains by enlisting digital ordering platform Olo, who raised $18 million earlier this year from Tiger Global Investment. For the Checkers & Rally’s partnership, Olo helped implement a system that funnels all orders from third-party services into one channel that goes directly into the main POS system. While this approach isn’t exactly new — Chowly and OrderOut both provide this type of integration — Olo’s platform is specifically designed for larger chains (Checkers & Rally’s has around 900 restaurants currently).

The program also offers a benefit to franchisees in the form of a single point of contact for business. Everything from contract negotiations with the third-party services to tech support to training is addressed through the same contact. I’ve spoken with enough restaurant operators in the last year to know that getting support from third-party delivery services can make a call to the IRS seem fun.

Rick Silva, President and CEO of Checkers Drive-In Restaurants, said in a press release that the company wants “to provide our franchisee community with a fully integrated platform that would make it easy and profitable to fulfill delivery orders.”

That’s an important point: delivery is more or less a mandatory part of business nowadays, but the economics of working with third party services don’t always make sense for franchises. Paul Flanders, CFO of Burger King franchisee Carrols Restaurant Group, recently noted that “The economics [of third-party delivery] are probably marginal for the [franchisee] operator.” Meanwhile, the aforementioned McSaga has McDonald’s franchisees questioning some of corporate’s decisions around the exclusive partnership McDonald’s has with Uber Eats, arguing for a better commission split with third parties, and, in some cases, the ability to work with more services than just Uber Eats. A post by the National Owners Association, a McDonald’s franchisee group started late last year, stated that, when it comes to the many changes franchisees have to face, “simplification needs to be priority one.”

Simplification appears to be what Checkers & Rally’s is after with its newly launched delivery program. Of course, making it easier to take multiple orders from multiple services is only one element of doing cost-effective, operationally efficient delivery. But Checkers & Rally’s appears to be making franchisees an integral part of the process when making decisions about delivery, rather than an afterthought you throw technology at.

The numbers will tell how effective this strategy is, and we’ll have to wait for those until the next round of earnings calls. In the meantime, the new program will serve both delivery and pickup orders.

Postmates’ New Party Feature Is Another Way to Waive Delivery Fees

Yesterday, Postmates launched a new feature called Postmates Party, which lets customers in the same vicinity opt to share drivers and in return get food delivered for free.

As TechCrunch pointed out, the feature is a lot like Uber’s POOL feature. Postmates Party lets you see where others in your neighborhood are ordering from at that exact moment and essentially piggyback off those orders. Postmates waives the delivery fee and any peak time pricing when you order from those restaurants at that time.

There is a five-minute window from the time you select Party to the time you must checkout in order to get the free delivery:

The feature is clearly aimed at price-conscious customers who might not want to pay a delivery fee for every single order they place via Postmates, and it’s one of many new ways third-party delivery services are trying to stand out in the competition and also retain customers. Those moves include ghost kitchens from Uber Eats, DoorDash testing out self-driving cars, and Postmates experimenting with a delivery rover that looks like Minion.

Big moves and technologies like those above are great, and may even be necessary. But what’s interesting about Postmates Party is that it’s a small addition to the service that offers a solution to a big problem: fees. A Technomic forecast that explored off-premises restaurant trends recently honed in on per-delivery fees with third-party services as a barrier to consumer adoption. While the forecast was specifically talking about subscription models (another appealing new feature of most services), pooling orders with nearby strangers is appealing because it requires no additional steps from the customer, so long as they get that order in within the five-minute window Postmates has provided.

For Postmates, the feature could also streamline its operations a bit because it can cluster orders in the same neighborhoods and save on how many drivers it has to pay, how many trips those drivers take, etc.

Interestingly, Postmates unrolled the feature just as Uber Eats came under fire for a confusing new pricing structure that has Reddit users the world over calling bullshit on the service for actually marking prices up.

Also this week, CNBC reported that Grubhub is losing customer retention and, according to analysts, “will have to add three times as many new diners in the third quarter of this year compared to 2018 to make up for expected churn.”

While we don’t have any numbers yet on how Postmates’ new Party feature is performing, the service may be wise to focus its efforts on iterative changes to its app that cost the customer nothing (in terms of both money and time) and might even make the service more efficient in some places.

Postmates Party is currently only available in select U.S. cities: NYC, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, San Francisco, Long Beach, CA, Miami, San Diego, Seattle, Orange County, CA, and Philadelphia.

Waitr Takes a Bite Out of the Third-Party Delivery Market, One Small City at a Time

A brief history lesson: When Walmart first became successful enough to expand outside its home state of Arkansas in the 1960s, the company didn’t immediately barrel into heavily populated coastal cities like New York or Los Angeles. Instead, it opened locations Missouri and Oklahoma — neighboring states but not exactly the epicenter of commerce. Walmart didn’t actually make it to California until the ‘80s and New York until the ‘90s.

Chris Meaux, CEO of delivery service Waitr, argues that this focus on smaller markets is how Walmart built the mega-popular status it enjoys today. And if he has his way, Waitr will eventually be able to tell a similar story.

“[They] had such brand equity that they eventually got pulled into [major] cities,” he says of the big-box retailer’s eventual coast-to-coast expansion. “And I think the same thing could happen to Waitr over time. We’re building a very strong brand in the markets we serve. If the demand for that brand requires we get pulled into major markets, we’ll do it.”

To the consumer, Waitr looks much like any third-party delivery service: You download an app, order food, and wait for someone to deliver it. The company operates in many of the same markets as — and many markets where those bigger players aren’t.

To be clear, Waitr isn’t trying to be the next Walmart. It is, however, following the retail giant’s strategy of expanding from its smallish hometown — in this case, Lake Charles, Louisiana — into other smallish cities before heading to the mid-sized markets a la Minneapolis or Amarillo, Texas. Major metropolises aren’t even on the wish list right now.

Even its website emphasizes this localish approach, pushing the image of a hometown food service rather than a faceless entity that’s in every other American city. As Meaux explained over the phone recently, these places are perfect markets for Waitr’s business “because they haven’t gotten attention from some of the larger companies.”

Waitr’s current territory includes much of the Southeast and two dozen cities in Texas. And with its recent acquisition of Bite Squad for $321.3 million, that reach expands to smaller coastal markets like Virginia and Hawaii.

“It was almost exactly the same business model as Waitr,” Meaux says of Bite Squad, adding that larger companies tend to be more focused on demand for consumers, whereas Waitr/Bit Squad puts a lot of emphasis on partnerships with restaurants and drivers, too.

How to employ drivers was a key area on which Waitr and Bite Squad agreed, and it’s the other thing setting Waitr apart from the larger delivery companies. Waitr has, according to Meaux, around 18,000 W2 employees as drivers on its payroll. And he’s aware of how absurdly expensive that sounds to most people.

“It’s really a policy that employees are more expensive,” he says. “Efficient employees are much less expensive.” Because Bite Squad can schedule employees to work when they actually need them, they can more easily accommodate busier periods of the day (dinnertime) and cut back when it’s slow (2 p.m.). Meaux says drivers are reimbursed for personal vehicle and cellphone use. “If you manage the driver flee right and you schedule the drivers when you need them, [you] can do it with a fraction of the drivers that [competitors] require. And as long as employees stay busy, the company profits, because its fees are hourly, rather than a flat rate. Bit Squad, who still maintains its own operations, uses an almost identical approach when it comes to drivers.

It’s impossible to now right now whether this is a sustainable model for the long term. But Meaux, along with Bite Squad CMO Craig Key, are optimistic. “We’re excited about the future about Wiater and Bite Squad, we’re deep into the integration,” says Meaux. “We have a lot of opportunity for growth and expansion. We believe in the next five to seven years or so, we have a chance to be a significant leader in the space.”

He says there will also be room in that future to continue exploring a subscription-based model, something other delivery companies are currently experimenting with, too. Bite Squad’s Unlimited service costs $5.99/month, and users can order from participating restaurants within a four-mile radius. Meaux says there’s “tremendous opportunity” for the unlimited model, though it won’t be as significant as, say Amazon Prime was for e-commerce. “Products or services are oftentimes options. Food is not an option.”

One could argue that delivery is optional, but at this point, it’s so widely and cheaply available it’s become commonplace. In fact, Waitr’s heaviest users, Meaux tells me, are “moms with kids” who “have no time.” Paying a five dollar fee to not throw kids in the car and drive to the restaurant or grocery store seems a small investment when looked at in that light, especially when it comes to smaller cities and longer distances between any two places.

DoorDash Raises $400 Million, Now Valued at $7.1B

DoorDash announced yesterday that it has raised $400 million in Series F funding, giving the delivery startup a $7.1 billion valuation. Temasek Holdings and Dragoneer Investment Group co-led the round, which brings the total amount raised by DoorDash to $1.4 billion.

The actual dollar amount raised was less than the $500 million that The Wall Street Journal had reported last week. But what’s $100 million among food delivery startups, which have been raking in the investments. Instacart has raised $1.9 billion while Postmates raised $678 million and has filed to go public.

My colleague, Jenn Marston, provided some context about DoorDash’s fundraise last week, when reports first surfaced, writing:

I expect 2019 to be a year of one company trying to unseat another repeatedly over the next several months as they expand into new territories and test out new technologies that might give them more dominance in the market. (Cue obligatory Game of Thrones metaphor.)

DoorDash is certainly on board with adopting new technologies, and the new funding could very well help the company further develop things like its self-driving car initiative or even something like drone deployment (something Uber has reportedly been dabbling in.) DoorDash last year posted a job listing for someone to help build “10x ideas from the ground up e.g. robotics, drones, next-gen dispatch, ML-chatbots, strategic partnerships, etc.” So drones likely are a part of the future, for DoorDash and probably every other delivery service mentioned in this post.

DoorDash recently became the first third-party delivery service to operate in all 50 states, and the company says its services are now available in 3,300 cities.

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.

The Brooklyn Councilman Who Wants to Ban Plastic Straws Is Now Going After Cutlery

There’s a new (plastic) target on the block for Brooklyn Councilman Rafael Espinal, otherwise known as the guy who introduced a ban on plastic straws in NYC last year. Today, Espinal introduced legislation that would lead to the eventual ban of disposable plastics like restaurant takeout cutlery.

The bill wouldn’t actually ban the cutlery itself. Rather, it would require the city to “review items made with single use plastics at least annually and ban those items for which reasonable alternatives are available.” That task would fall to the NYC department of Consumer Affairs, along with the department of Sanitation and the department of Environmental Protection.

From the legislation text:

The commissioner shall on February 1, 2020, and annually thereafter, report to the mayor and the speaker of the city council on single use plastic items considered, the evaluation including economic feasibility and environmental effectiveness, and the determinations.

Only after these areas are evaluated and a suitable replacement found would the ban on the actual plastic item, cutlery or otherwise, go into effect. Which sounds nice and orderly on paper but would in reality take a long time to go into effect — years, in fact.

Still, the proposed legislation continues the conversation around what to do about the amount of single-use plastic that goes into the trash. Investor Rob Kaplan of Circulate Capital, whose work is heavily involved in the environment, put it well last year when he told National Geographic: “There’s no silver bullet to stop plastic pollution. We’re not going to be able to recycle our way out of the problem, and we’re not going to be able to reduce our way out of the problem,” adding that we have to pursue both tracks while continuing to seek other solutions to make any sort of dent.

In the world of single-use plastics, particularly those at restaurants, Espinal’s legislation is aimed at finding those other solutions. How challenging that would be remains a question mark. Nix a plastic straw and your beverages are still drinkable; nix a plastic spoon, and you’ll have to get creative about how to eat that cup of mashed potatoes from the diner.

There’s also the question of what “reasonable alternative” would actually entail. The legislation discusses “economic feasibility” and “environmental feasibility,” but doesn’t point to specific materials that could replace plastic. There are a number of plastic alternatives when it comes to things like cutlery, from wood to vegetable starch and other plant-based materials. But again, there’s the economic factors to consider, and the proposed legislation text only says economic feasibility includes “direct and avoided costs such as whether the material is capable of being collected by the department in the same truck as source separated metal, glass and plastic recyclable material, and shall include consideration of markets for recycled material.”

We saw a number of private companies rally last year by banning plastic straws, or at least kickstarting the process to ban them. If Espinal’s new legislation were to be effective, it would need to happen in tandem with another massive effort on the part of companies like Starbucks, Alaska Airlines, and others to ban single-use items like cutlery, plastic bags, and other eating items. In this to-go-obsessed culture, that could be a huge ask.

So maybe it’s time for the delivery companies themselves to get involved. Ever the skeptic, I have my doubts this would ever happen. But companies like Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash are wielding a massive influence over U.S. culture at the moment. It would be nice to think they could use that influence (and money) to show the rest of us how to creatively counter the craze for single-use plastics.

The Dunkin’-Grubhub Delivery Deal Is Great News for Consumers, Bad News for Starbucks

Dunkin’, the chain formerly known as Dunkin’ Donuts, announced today it will begin testing a delivery program with Grubhub in select cities, NRN reports.

The delivery rollout follows a year of moves by the Quincy, Massachusetts-based chain to shed its former image as a donut chain and compete with premium coffee retailers, namely Starbucks. In January 2018, Dunkin’ unveiled its “Next Gen” store, which offers a more modern design as well as a dedicated drive-thru lane for customers placing mobile orders. Dunkin’ made itself available for order via Alexa in 2018, too. And the chain dropped “Donuts” from its name, doubling down on its efforts to focus the brand on beverages and not on its signature treat, frowned upon by nutritionists everywhere nowadays. (Fun fact: Dunkin’ Donuts is largely responsible for changing our spelling of the word from “doughnut” to “donut.”)

The chain also did a massive product relaunch of its espresso, reformulating the recipe and proclaiming their espresso, in the words of CMO Tony Weisman, “is so good, you don’t have to go to Starbucks.”

The Grubhub deal is non-exclusive, as Dunkin’ also partners with DoorDash and will continue to do so.

But as delivery continues to become the norm rather than the exception, there may well be fewer folks who want to go to Starbucks anyway. The Seattle coffee giant expanded its Uber Eats delivery program in January in San Francisco, and will continue rolling it out to major U.S. cities over the next several months. It’s also worth noting that Starbucks has significantly more locations nationwide, though Dunkin’ is slowly but surely expanding out of its New England home turf.

Delivery may well become the ultimate battleground for these two companies. Post espresso relaunch, Dunkin’ is, in my caffeine-riddled opinion, on par with Starbucks in terms of quality (and better sometimes). Starbucks has nicer interiors, but Dunkin’ has better prices. Both offer things like streamlined drive-thrus and easy-to-use mobile apps. So whoever can master the most efficient, cost-effective way to deliver these premium drinks is likely the one who will come out on top, at least in the short term.

Dunkin’ hasn’t yet released information about which cities it will deliver in with Grubhub, or when that’s slated to begin. But one thing’s clear: Quincy and Seattle are in lockstep right now, and their race for dominance will only get more heated as 2019 goes on.

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.