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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food delivery

Refraction Launches Robotic Lunch Delivery in Ann Arbor, MI

Given that we’ve already seen Refraction AI‘s REV-1 autonomous delivery vehicle tackle the snow covered roads of Ann Arbor, MI, it’s not really a surprise that the company announced today — in the middle of December — that it will start delivering lunches to people who don’t want to brave the cold.

Refraction will now provide food delivery for customers within a 2.5 mile zone. Local restaurants Miss Kim, Belly Deli, Tios Mexican Cafe and Chow ow Asian Street Food are participating. To sign up for the service, hungry people can fill out this form, after which they will receive instructions on how to place their order. Once done, they will receive a unique code and delivery updates. When the self-driving REV-1 arrives outside the destination, the customer is notified to meet the robot at the curb and enter the unique code to grab their food.

Normally we wouldn’t cover such a local story, but this is the first delivery partner announcement from Refraction since the company launched this past summer. Additionally, the REV-1 is different from other autonomous delivery vehicles that are starting to come to market.

The REV-1 is a three-wheeled robot sits somewhere between the bigger pod-like autonomous vehicles Nuro makes and the smaller, cooler sized robots from Starship and Kiwi. This “Goldilocks” type size means it can travel in a road’s bike lane, making it an compelling mode of delivery for both urban and suburban areas.

Plus, as noted above, the REV-1 was built to be rugged and able to travel in inclement weather. As we wrote previously:

First is the environmental scanning provided by a 12-camera setup as well as ultrasound and radar sensors on the REV-1. To make the robot less expensive, the REV-1 foregoes the LIDAR systems popular with other autonomous robots. And according to Johnson-Roberson, Refraction AI’s camera rig also allows the robot to track things not on the ground like buildings and cars to navigate even when road lines are not visible. The other way the REV-1 takes on bad weather is rather low tech. “We’re using fat bike tires a low PSI so they are squishy,” said Johnson-Roberson. “They can run in snow and rain.”

Robots are (slowly) moving from the testing phase to the market stage. Nuro just announced this week that it will be testing grocery delivery with Walmart in Houston. Postmates’ Serve is scurrying around making deliveries in Los Angeles. Starship’s robots are now roaming around multiple college campuses across the country. Kiwi announced its own reinvention last week.

Ultimately, food delivery from restaurants and grocery stores will require a number of different styles of vehicles. With its unique shape, the REV-1 looks like its ready to carve out its own (bike) lane.

Week in Restaurants: Uber Eats Launches Group Ordering, Waitr Could Get Delisted

Recent news from suburban destination Dave & Buster’s brings up memories of the weekend I had one too many Washington Apples and lost my credit card during a Dance Dance Revolution challenge. If you’re planning similar shenanigans for the weekend, you might want leave the plastic at home and consider the chain’s new contactless payment app. More on that below, along with a few more noteworthy stories that happened in the restaurant industry this week.

Uber Launches Group Ordering
Aiming to further streamline the process for customers choosing and ordering food, Uber Eats this week launched a Group Order feature that lets multiple people participate in a single order. Customers just click the “Start Group Order” button within the app and can then share a link with friends, family, and coworkers, according to a blog post from Uber Eats. Restaurants can opt into the service for no additional charge. The feature is similar to Postmates group order feature, which launched this past August. DoorDash, meanwhile, has offered group ordering since 2017.

Waitr in Danger of Getting Delisted 
Third-party delivery service Waitr is in danger of getting delisted by Nasdaq, according to a recent regulatory filing. Nasdaq warned that the Louisiana-based company could be delisted because its stock has been below $1 per share for the last 30 consecutive business days. Waitr has until June 1, 2020 to regain compliance, which means its common stock needs to close at $1 or more per share for 10 consecutive business days before that time. This time last year, Waitr looked to be a promising alternative to bigger services (DoorDash, Uber Eats) for smaller U.S. cities. That has not been the case for Waitr, which has struggled over the last 12 months with bad press and profitability issues alike. The company acquired Bite Squad earlier in the year but has since written off much of that deal. 

Flynn Restaurant Group Offers Instant Pay to Restaurant Workers
A sad reality for the restaurant biz is that its workers earning an hourly wage often live paycheck to paycheck. Of late, more restaurants are addressing the issue by teaming up with tech companies that offer employees faster access to their wages. The latest is DailyPay, an app users can link their bank account, payroll card, or debit card to and instantly access their earned but unpaid wages. This week, the company announced a partnership with Flynn Restaurant Group, parent company of well-known restaurant chains like Applebee’s, Arby’s, and Panera. According to a press release, the partnership makes DailyPay’s capabilities available to more than 48,000 restaurant employees across the U.S. 

Dave & Buster’s Unveils In-store Contactless Payments App
If you’re up for a night of drinks and arcade games but worry about losing your credit card in the process (see above), there’s now an app for that. Dave & Buster’s this week announced a mobile app customers can use to pay for games at the famed arcade/bar/restaurant. Previously, one swiped a credit card to start a game. With the new app, customers can simply tap their phone. The app also manages rewards points users earn from in-store purchases like games.

Postmates Lays Off ‘Dozens’ of Employees, Shutters Mexico City Office

Food-delivery company Postmates — generally seen as one of the big four alongside DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats — has laid off dozens of employees and closed down its Mexico City office, according to an article published on CNBC.

Postmates has not said exactly how many layoffs it is doing, noting only in a statement to CNBC that “the number was at least several dozen and included people in the San Francisco headquarters as well as in Los Angeles, Nashville, Tennessee, and other offices.” The layoffs started this week, according to one CNBC source. According to another source from the same article, the company is in talks to find a potential buyer.

The news paints a drastically different version of Postmates from the one we were staring at just a few months ago, when the San Francisco-based service raised another $225 million, bumping its valuation up to $2.4 billion. The company also filed paperwork for an IPO earlier in 2019.

Since then, however, the market for both IPOs and food delivery services has taken a left turn to some darker place than anticipated at this time last year.

On the IPO front, disappointing debuts from Uber and Lyft, not to mention the ongoing WeWork meltdown, have altered investor sentiment. In other words, investors aren’t necessarily rushing to back companies with questionable profitability models.

Food delivery services in particular are getting more and more questions around not just their profitability (which doesn’t exist) but also their sustainability over the long term. Getting a latté delivered to your door might be convenient, but the process is increasingly fraught with tensions over how these companies handle commission fees for restaurants and treat their workers. Suffice to say, those tensions have called into question the current model for restaurant food delivery.

Postmates hasn’t been center stage for much of these debates. Instead, the service has kept busy in 2019 doing high-profile partnerships with Major League Baseball teams and national restaurant chains. In fact, just this morning, Postmates announced a major deal to start delivering TGI Friday’s in the U.S.

Nonetheless, the company is feeling the effects of the War on Food Delivery, as this week’s news makes clear. “We made the difficult decision to end operations in Mexico City as we focus on our continued growth in the U.S.,” Postmates said in a statement to CNBC. “We continually review our business to ensure that staffing is aligned with current business needs and have made small adjustments as a result.”

Newsletter: Will E-Bikes Take Charge? Plus, Precise Heating Comes Home

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Delivery robots like those from Starship and self-driving vehicles like Nuro‘s grab a lot of headlines when it comes to the future of food and meal delivery. And it’s easy to understand why–robots are cool, man! But I have one bit of advice when it comes to the business of food delivery as we head into 2020:

Don’t sleep on electric bikes. They could be a huge platform in cities.

This is a prediction I’ve made before, when Uber bought e-bike rental company Jump last year. But yesterday’s announcement that Australian company Bolt Bikes launched its e-bikes for delivery service in the U.S. and U.K. got me thinking about a potential bicycle boom in food delivery.

TechCrunch reports that Bolt rents out bikes for commercial use on a two-week contract for $39. As TechCrunch writes, “The Bolt Bikes platform includes the electric bike, fleet management software, financing and servicing. Subscribers get 24-hour access to the bike. A battery charger, phone holder, phone USB port, secure U-Lock and safety induction is included.” Postmates has reportedly been piloting Bolt Bikes in SF since June.

E-bikes are actually great for city environments. They are fast, nimble on traffic-choked streets and take (most of) the work out of going uphill. Plus they have human drivers, so you don’t have to worry about the potential human/robot issues that come with even small autonomous delivery vehicles.

Though they aren’t as well suited for longer distances, e-bikes could also work in some suburban areas with tightly packed homes (think: housing developments), especially as part of a hub-and-spoke model. Next summer, Uber Eats is testing drone delivery of food to centralized drop off points where delivery people pick orders up and drive them the last mile. Instead of cars rolling around the suburbs, an e-bike could make that last mile more economical, faster (no need to park) and more welcome for neighborhoods that don’t want a lot more delivery cars driving around.

Bicycles already have already enjoyed a place in food delivery, especially in more dense urban areas, but the advent of affordable e-bikes could really charge up their use for getting you fed.

Precision Temperatures

I’m going to steal from WIRED here for a moment, but:

TIRED: Heat
WIRED: Precise heat control to the exact temperature you want

We covered two different technologies this week deliver granular control to the way you heat either a beverage or your BBQ.

First up we took Ember’s new Travel Mug<sup>2</sup> out for a spin. The Tesla of travel coffee mugs runs a whopping $180 and keeps your coffee at a constant hot temperature of your choosing. This second-generation Ember mug features great design and clever controls, but sadly the promised three-hour battery life diminished pretty quickly in real world circumstances. Check out our full review.

On a much larger scale, the just-announced Weber SmokeFire grill features the connected cooking smarts of a June Oven. The two companies announced that the JuneOS will power the Weber Connect app that controls the SmokeFire. You can also get step-by-step instructions to become a master griller and dial in a constant temperature for those long brisket smoking sessions.

The Ember Travel Mug <sup>2</sup> is available now if you’re looking for a pricey stocking stuffer, and while the SmokeFire ($999) won’t be out until 2020, you can pre-order it on Cyber Monday.

The New Spoon Logo

A New Spoon

If you’ve been to our website this week, then you’ll notice an entirely new look and a new logo.

As Spoon founder Mike Wolf noted when introducing the new site yesterday:

We launched the Spoon in October 2016. At the time, we didn’t know what it would become, all we knew is that we wanted to tell the stories of the people and companies shaping the future of food and cooking.

He went on, saying:

With thousands of stories published and hundreds of thousands of readers per month, The Spoon is a big part of what we do and we figured it was time the site got a fresh coat of paint and maybe even a new beam or two.

The Spoon will remain the best place for all the food tech news and analysis you need to know, it’s just going to be easier to read and navigate. G’head and click through it and tell us what you think!

Speaking of our new logo, you’ll be able to see it on display in Vegas during CES at our second annual FoodTech Live. Last year we had over forty companies showing their stuff, so if you have new kitchen or food tech product and want to show off your wares, make sure to check out our event page!

Woowa Bros. to Rent Out In-Restaurant Bots that Deliver Food to Your Table

When we’ve written about Korean company Woowa Bros.’ robotic ambitions in the past, it’s been around delivering food from restaurants to your customers’ own homes. But the company announced a new plan on Monday to have its Dilly ‘bots deliver food inside restaurants to your table, too.

The Aju Business Daily reports that Woowa is launching a robot rental program wherein restaurants can pay 900,000 won (~$773 USD) per month with a two-year contract.

Aju Business Daily is light on details, saying only that the Dilly can carry food to four tables at a time and bus dirty dishes back to the kitchen. That sounds a lot like the Penny robot Bear Robotics offers (and tested out at a Pizza Hut in Seoul last year). Woowa is an investor in Bear Robotics, and we’ve reached out to Bear’s to see if its technology is involved in Woowa’s new offering.

As off-premises dining continues to play an increasingly important role for restaurants, many players look to build autonomous robots for food delivery (Postmates, Kiwi, Starship, etc.). There aren’t as many focused on in-store dining, which presents an opportunity for companies like Woowa and Bear.

Woowa Brothers operates the popular Baedal Minjok food delivery app in South Korea, and the company has not been shy about building out its robot fleet. Last December the company received a $320 million investment round in part to help it develop more autonomous robots, and this past July the company formed a partnership with UCLA to research and develop cooking robots.

Newsletter: Third-party Food Delivery Keeps on Fighting, But Its Opponent Is Getting Stronger

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It’s getting to be that time when us journalists haul out the predictions for the coming year. You can be sure we here at The Spoon will have plenty of those in the coming weeks. And you can be sure some of them will center around the how the food delivery model could change in the wake of the many controversies its currently mired in. Exorbitant commissions for restaurants, antitrust accusations, paying workers a wage they can’t live on — all this and more (did I mention plummeting stock?) underscores the same point: the third-party food delivery model is unsustainable, far from profitable, and larger swaths of the entire food industry are starting to push back. Hard.

Another log went on that fire last week when online grocery fulfillment platform Instacart cut bonuses for its Shoppers — that is, the folks getting groceries off the shelf and delivering them to customers’ houses. Oh, and it just so happened that this cut, which can reportedly account for up to 40 percent of some Shoppers’ earnings per order, came just days after said Shoppers instituted a protest over previous changes to their pay.

Instacart says the new pay cut is “not a form of retaliation.” Whether that’s completely true or not seems irrelevant. It’s a bad look for Instacart, who, along with DoorDash and Postmates, already came under fire earlier this year for its worker-tipping policy.

Then there’s the fight over AB 5, California’s so-called “gig worker bill,” which was signed into law recently and reclassifies gig workers as actual employees. Instacart is not in on that fight, but DoorDash, Uber, and Lyft are, and they’ve vowed to spend $90 million in 2020 to get a ballot measure passed that would counteract AB 5. Talk about a bad look.

Plus, even if these companies overturn the protections laid out in AB 5, they will still face an endless series of new bills, laws, and regulations that will undercut their core business model and further put the question of profitability in question. Meanwhile, investors are getting antsy, and restaurants themselves are starting to take pieces of the delivery chain, from branding to retaining customer data, back in-house, further eroding the reach of third-party delivery.

Instacart, DoorDash, Uber, and others can fight all they want, but their opponents are getting undeniably stronger. Grab your (delivered) popcorn and sit back. The battle is far from over.

Food Delivery Services Pile On New Features
One fighting tactic for food delivery services is far simpler than pledging tens of millions of dollars to fight legislation: pile on the features in the hopes of attracting more customers and restaurant partners.

This week, Deliveroo announced a pickup feature that lets customers order food via the app then collect it themselves, bypassing the delivery fee on the way. The move could appeal to more cost-conscious folks. Customers ordering food might not want to pay a $5 delivery fee for a restaurant that’s a three-minute walk away. And some restaurants could find the option appealing as it would allow them to work with these off-premise order platforms but pay them slightly lower commission fees.

Uber Eats also recently announced some discounts for its restaurant parters — specifically those who use the Ordermark system, which funnels delivery orders from different third-party channels into the restaurant’s main POS system. Ordermark restaurant customers who sign up to use Uber Eats through the Ordermark platform will receive discounted rates.

Eats is also selling ad space inside its platform to restaurants. “If we have all the restaurants on the marketplace and we give them tools to help them grow, then this will be a very efficient marketplace,” Uber told TechCrunch.

The Robots Are Coming (For Your Food Order)
In another likely scenario for the future, we won’t need a gig economy because the robots will do it all.

At least, they’ll be able to do an awful lot of peddling restaurant and grocery deliveries to customers’ apartments and houses. With delivery robots roving around college campuses, some cities, and now Russia, it’s possible — nay, inevitable — that delivery services will render the debate over human workers pointless by replacing said humans with these six-wheeled bots.

So too will autonomous vehicles. Amid far more controversial statements this week, Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s said autonomous ride-hailing is probably five to ten years off, and that there will be some autonomous driving going in just three to five years for simple tasks and routes.

Writing about the Uber news, my colleague Chris Albrecht points out that “food delivery certainly seems like it could fit the bill when it comes to simple tasks and routes” and that autonomous vehicles nix the cost of human drivers. But he also rightly notes that “this displacement of human labor brings up its own societal issues.” Which means robots and autonomous vehicles could potentially resolve some of the fight around the gig economy, but they’ll open up a fresh can of worms when it comes to the ethics of the food delivery model.

Uber CEO: “Some Version” of Autonomous Driving for Simple Tasks Coming in 3 to 5 Years

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s comments on Saudi Arabia are rightly grabbing most of the headlines today, following his televised appearance on Axios on HBO this weekend. But during that interview, Khosrowshahi also said some things about Uber’s autonomous driving future which are worth at least noting.

Axios posted an unaired clip from that interview and in it, Khosrowshahi says that full autonomous ride-hailing is probably five to ten years off. However, he thinks that for very simple routes and tasks, there will be some form of autonomous driving going on in just three to five years.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi talks autonomous vehicles

Though he doesn’t mention Uber Eats specifically in the clip, food delivery certainly seems like it could fit the bill when it comes to simple tasks and routes. As Khosrowshahi points out, safety is still a huge issue for autonomous vehicles. On its face, carrying food instead of people is at least a little bit safer, because there is no one inside the self-driving vehicle who can get injured. (Obviously it still needs to be safe for pedestrians and other people out in the world.)

Also carrying food is a much simpler task than carrying a person, who may not be at a pickup point, or might want to get dropped off at a particular spot, or could even barf in the backseat of a car.

Uber could also create simple, autonomous routes for food delivery, similar to the hub and spoke model we talked about with Uber’s upcoming drone delivery. If Uber builds out more centralized ghost kitchens that host a number of different restaurants, food ordered from those restaurants could be bundled together into an autonomous vehicle that drives along a simple route to a drop-off point in a neighborhood where drivers pick it up for last mile delivery. This autonomous middle-mile is something that Walmart is already exploring to move goods between Walmart stores.

Autonomous vehicles also eliminate the cost of human drivers, so they would be cheaper to operate than Uber’s current fleet. This displacement of human labor brings up its own societal issues, and Uber is already in the hot seat for how it classifies its drivers. Uber is going to have to sort all this out because three years is not that far away.

Deliveroo Launches Pickup Feature for Restaurant Food

Deliveroo has launched a new pickup feature that lets users place an order then go to the restaurant and get the food themselves, according to The Telegraph. The new service is live at over 700 restaurants in the UK, and Deliveroo says it plans to offer the feature in 10,000 UK restaurants within one year.

As features go, this one is pretty straightforward. Users order from restaurants via the Deliveroo app, then simply choose the “pickup” option to collect the food, rather than having to pay a delivery fee and wait for a driver to deliver the meal.

Deliveroo says it will launch the feature internationally in Hong Kong, Australia, Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain this year.

The move will appeal to those consumers looking to shave bit off the overall cost of lunch or dinner — an enticing option for densely packed urban areas where the a person’s restaurant of choice might be as close as across the street or on the next block. More importantly, offering pickup could help Deliveroo appeal to more restaurants who want to offer off-premises ordering but may not want to fork over the hefty commission fees associated with delivery. To be clear: with pickup orders, restaurants still pay Deliveroo commission, just less so than it would be with delivery.

The additional revenue from a pickup service will help Deliveroo remain competitive, particularly in the wake of its massive investment from Amazon being delayed by the Competition and Markets Authority’s investigation. The CMA has until December 11 to decide whether to take Amazon’s investment into the next phase of investigation.

Meanwhile, the market for food delivery in Europe remains a crowded one. Deliveroo faces competition from Uber Eats, who has a sizable presence on that continent and could further expand its own recently launched pickup feature the company launched last month.

Then there’s Just Eat, an already massive food delivery company that’s currently tied up in a bidding war between Netherlands-based food delivery service Takeaway.com and Naspers spinoff Prosus. It’s looking more and more likely that Takeaway.com will win that fight, which would turn Just Eat-Takeaway.com into one of the largest food delivery services in the world, and certainly in Europe.

Diversifying its offerings to restaurant partners seems to be the tactic Deliveroo is using to stay competitive. In addition to offering a pickup program, the company also this year launched a procurement platform to supply restaurants with discount ingredients, equipment, and other supplies. It also started the Restaurant Rescue Team, which turns struggling restaurant businesses into ghost kitchens in an effort to save them.

Russia’s Yandex Gets Into the Delivery Bot Game

Russia-based company Yandex announced this week that it’s rolling out its own autonomous delivery robot. Dubbed the Yandex.Rover, it’s a squat, six-wheeled cooler-sized robot that can scoot around at a walking pace, delivering packages and food.

Yandex is often referred to as the Russian Google. According to the press announcement, its Rover has already hit the road at the company’s headquarters in Moscow. Similar to other delivery robots like those from Starship and Kiwi, the Yandex.Rover uses lidar and can travel autonomously (with remote supervision), recognize objects, and avoid pedestrians, animals and other obstacles.

Synergy is the name of the game for the Yandex.Rover, as it will eventually be put to use delivering meals from Yandex.Eats, groceries from Yandex.Lavka and goods from the online marketplace Beru.

At first blush, the Yandex.Rover is probably most analogous to Amazon’s Scout rover bot. Scout is currently being tested in Washington state and California for small package deliveries from Amazon. While the company hasn’t made any specific announcements, it’s not hard to imagine the Scout bot being used for food delivery from Whole Foods, Amazon Go or the eventual Amazon-branded supermarket chain.

Other autonomous delivery robots like the aforementioned Starship and Kiwi are focusing on providing food delivery to college campuses, though there is some general expansion into cities such as Sacramento.

Robots like these could drastically alter the food delivery landscape in terms of how people get their meals. Here in the U.S. at least, there are still a number of legal and infrastructure hurdles that need to be overcome before they ever become commonplace. I’m not familiar with the regulatory world of Russia, it’s hard to say if Yandex will face similar scrutiny.

Starship Robots Roll Out to University of Wisconsin-Madison, Can They Survive the Winter?

I’ve never been to Wisconsin, but people from there tell me that it gets cold about this time of year, I mean, it snowed there on Halloween last week, with more expected tomorrow and Wednesday. This type of inclement weather was actually the first thing I thought about when Starship sent me a press release today announcing that its robots are now rolling around the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M), delivering food.

Starship makes six-wheeled, cooler-sized robots that can carry 20 pounds worth of cargo. UW-M has 66,000 students, staff and faculty, and is getting 30 Starship robots those people can use by downloading the Starship app, ordering from three different markets at the school and dropping a pin on the campus map to set the delivery point. There is a $1.99 delivery fee and at first, the delivery area will be limited to a specific area before expanding across campus.

This is the latest school to adopt Starship’s delivery robots, following George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, Purdue, University of Houston and the University Pittsburgh.

Pitt, however, recently suspended its robot delivery program after running into issues with the autonomous robots allegedly blocking sidewalk access to people in wheelchairs.

That type of real-world complication makes me wonder how the robots will do when truly nasty Wisconsin weather strikes. On the one hand, I’m sure that Starship and the UW-M have thought about this and come up with solutions. One advantage to delivering on campuses is that they are smaller geographic areas with lots of walkways and dedicated maintenance staffs to keep those walkways safe and clear.

But still, snow and ice could be big obstacles for a robot with little wheels. That’s one of the reasons Refraction.ai is using fat bike tires for its autonomous robots. Not to mention that the performance of lithium-ion batteries, like those in Starship robots, degrades in cold temperatures. We reached out to Starship to see how they will address the cold, and will update when we hear back.

UPDATE: Starship sent us the following statement: “The robots are designed to work in a variety of conditions including snow and rain. There is negligible battery degradation in the extreme cold.”

In the meantime, there are now 66,000 people at UW-M who are more likely to avoid the bitter cold and can stay in and order food thanks to Starship’s robots.

The Week in Restaurants: Grubhub vs. NYC (Again), Choco Reinvents Ingredient Sourcing

Between trick-or-treat excursions, earnings calls galore, and the fact that AI is going to take over the restaurant industry, it’s been a busy week. While you battle the comedown from your Halloween sugar high, here are a few more bits of news from the restaurant industry this week.

Grubhub Had a Bummer of a Week
The Grubhub versus NYC restaurants showdown continues. This week, 30 members of the New York City council signed a letter demanding refunds for restaurants who were allegedly charged incorrect phone order fees by Grubhub. The letter is a response to a class-action lawsuit by a restaurant operator claiming they were charged for calls that did not result in actual orders, and it’s the latest event in an ongoing saga between Grubhub and NYC over how the third-party delivery service treats its restaurant partners. It also comes just on the heels of Grubhub’s disappointing third-quarter results, which show the service is slowing down in terms of growth and losing ground to DoorDash.

Choco Raises $33.5M for Ingredient Ordering Platform
Ask just about any restaurant operator, and they’ll tell you that sourcing ingredients is a time-consuming, error-prone process that still heavily relies on leaving voicemails and sending faxes. A company called Choco wants to change that with its mobile ordering platform for restaurants and suppliers that essentially acts like a food delivery app for ingredients. The company announced this week it has closed a $33.5 million Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The service is currently available in 15 cities across the U.S. and Europe, at chain restaurants and Michelin-star joints alike.

Little Caesars Takes its Pizza Portal to Canada
Little Caesars unveiled its Pizza Portal technology to Canadian customers this week. The heated, self-service pickup station, which has been in the U.S. for a little over one year now, lets users order a pie via the Little Caesars mobile app then skip the in-store line and simply scan a QR code to unlock their “portal” and grab their food. The Pizza Portal is now available in “nearly all” Little Caesars locations in Canada. Whether the chain will ever join the masses and start offering delivery remains unknown, but as Pizza Portal’s expansion suggests, delivery or no, Little Caesars isn’t sitting on its hands when it comes to improving and growing its digital strategy.

Waitr Partners With Checkers & Rally’s for Delivery
Louisiana-based delivery service Waitr announced a partnership this week with burger chain Checkers & Rally’s to deliver from over 200 of the latter’s locations in the U.S. The move looks to be part of an ongoing effort on Waitr’s part to team up with larger, higher-profile restaurant chains.

DoorDash’s New Carousel Shows Off All the Impossible Foods Offerings in Your Area

As of yesterday, DoorDash has created a custom carousel featuring restaurants that offer Impossible Foods menu items.

When consumers click on the Impossible filter on the DoorDash site, they’re taken to a separate page which shows only establishments offering delivery of the plant-based meat within their area. So far, the feature is available in 23 cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.

I’m currently visiting a friend in New York, so I decided to give the Impossible filter a spin for myself. After putting in her address and clicking on the ‘See All’ Impossible button, I was taken to a new page listing 7 restaurants which sold Impossible items. These ranged from fast-food, like Burger King and White Castle, to more high-end local restaurants.

This Impossible filter is DoorDash’s first carousel featuring a specific plant-based meat brand. It’s clearly a bid by the food delivery company to capitalize on an item with a growing delivery presence. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, DoorDash customer searches for ‘Impossible burger’ have tripled since January of this year alone.

Why the Impossible burger and not, say, the Beyond burger? I’m guessing because Impossible just has a bigger restaurant footprint right now, what with its partnerships with fast-food chains like Burger King. In fact, DoorDash isn’t the only one to see a spike in orders for the bleeding plant-based burger. Back in July of this year Grubhub released a report showing that orders for the Impossible burger rose 82 percent in 2019.

The Impossible filter comes at a time when DoorDash needs to do whatever it can to stand out in the cutthroat food delivery space. DoorDash stole the title for the number one U.S. food delivery company from Grubhub in June of this year, and currently holds 35 percent of the market share. In order to hang onto that lead, the company is smart to experiment with ways to expand their offerings and attract more consumers. From ghost kitchens to filters featuring popular plant-based burgers, DoorDash has shown that they’re not afraid to experiment to keep their hold on the food delivery crown.

If you live in one of the aforementioned participating cities, you can order menu items featured in the Impossible carousel with $0 delivery fees from now until November 7th.