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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food delivery

Bite Squad Launches Campaign to Deliver Meals to Needy Families This Thanksgiving

It’s not even Halloween yet, but already grocery store displays are showing off pumpkin pie filling, boxed stuffing, and other accoutrements to the traditional Thanksgiving meal. But with 37 million people in the U.S., including 11 million children, currently struggling with hunger, putting an elaborate holiday feast together is a stretch for many, out of the question for some.

On-demand food service Bite Squad has responded to the problem today by announcing a new campaign to deliver hot meals on Thanksgiving to thousands of families in need. Called Share Thanksgiving 2019, the program originally belonged to food delivery service Waitr, which Bite Squad acquired in 2018. It works like this: from today until November 5, restaurants are invited to commit to donating meals to families in need. Meanwhile, Bite Squad-Waitr employees and customers can nominate families. Bite Squad will also work with local community organizations to identify those most in need.

From the campaign page:
Over the next month, Waitr and Bite Squad employees and members of the local community will nominate families in need for the program. During this period, when anyone orders from Waitr, the company will make a donation that will go toward covering the cost of the meals. Each meal will be prepared by participating restaurant partners, allowing us to jointly provide eligible families with (literally!) restaurant-quality meals.

Just before Thanksgiving day, volunteer employees will come together to deliver the meals to the families.

Waitr founded the campaign in 2017, when it delivered 1,000 Thanksgiving meals to families in need. That number doubled in 2018, and this year, the Waitr-Bite Squad entity said it aims to share over 4,000 meals across 50 U.S. Waitr-Bite Squad markets. That includes the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

We’ll be keeping an eye out over the next few weeks for other restaurant and food companies doing their part to help the needy this Thanksgiving. (Know of any? Drop me a line.) In the meantime, those interested in Bite Squad’s program can nominate a family here.

Royal Caribbean Wants to be King of the World for Cruise Ship Food Delivery

By now, food delivery has made its way into college campuses, baseball stadiums, and traffic jams. It’s been only ever a matter of time before cruise ships followed, and this week, Royal Caribbean announced it is testing a food delivery service onboard its Symphony of the Seas ship.

According to a post on the Royal Caribbean blog, guests can now order food from specialty restaurants onboard via the main Royal Caribbean app.

Once signed into the app, guests will see an option to get food delivered from select restaurants on the ship. Right now that includes Johnny Rockets, Sorrentos pizza, and Izumi sushi. Like any other food-ordering app, guests select the items they want and designate where they would like the food delivered, be it their stateroom or some other place on the ship. If the latter, a user can select which deck of the ship they are on then drag a pinpoint to their exact location. There are a few “no delivery zones” onboard, which include pools, theaters, and other restaurants.

Image via Royal Caribbean.

Since the closest I’ve ever gotten to being onboard a cruise is reading a David Foster Wallace essay, I can’t personally speak to how exciting this news is. But groundbreaking or no, it’s to be expected. With food delivery being a “must have” for restaurants nowadays, it’s moved on to larger entertainment venues. And cruise ships are basically just massive entertainment space that float.

Nor is Royal Caribbean the first to try food delivery. This past summer, Carnival Cruise started testing delivery functionality in its own app for pizza and beverages, using a similar pin-drop functionality for users to designate their location.

A natural question is whether we’ll see third-party aggregators like DoorDash and Uber Eats try to hop onboard and scoop up some of the competition. On the one hand, cruise tend to be closed ecosystems, so to speak, of carefully curated experiences, so ceding some of that power to third parties doesn’t necessarily make sense. However, Postmates has already struck deals with baseball stadiums (see above) and essentially become part of the in-house branding, so it’s a stretch but not out of the question to think we might see them or another service on the sea at some point in future.

Uber to Merge Its Rideshare and Eats Apps, Partners With Rachel Ray for a Ghost Kitchen

At its event yesterday in San Francisco, Uber unleashed a slew of announcements and updates to its app, including merging Uber Eats into its main rideshare app, expanding its rewards program, and several other improvements geared towards bolstering the presence of Uber Eats in customers’ everyday lives.

Of all the food-centric news to come out of the event, what’s most interesting to us over here at The Spoon is Uber’s continued focus on ghost kitchens. The company announced yesterday it has teamed up with Rachel Ray to open a virtual restaurant whose menu will only be available on Uber Eats.

A blog post from Uber offered some details, though not a ton. The limited-time “restaurant” will run for 10 weeks in 10 cities and be timed with the launch of Ray’s new cookbook. Uber didn’t specify which cities and exactly when the launch will happen, but presumably the food will be cooked in one of the company’s growing number of ghost kitchens and delivered out to customers in a nearby radius.

The initiative highlights a new trend we’re seeing more of in ghost kitchens, which is using them to launch non-restaurant concepts that would be prohibitively expensive to test out in a traditional brick-and-mortar setting. Uber isn’t alone in this new arena: Grubhub has already launched two such initiatives, including a partnership with food publication Bon Appétit, which was announced earlier this week. Partnerships with big-name chefs seem a logical next step, and while the Uber-Rachel Ray deal is for a very limited time, it’s likely the first in what will be a long string of similar partnerships in future.

Rachel Ray wasn’t the only deal announced at the event yesterday. Uber Eats also unveiled an exclusive food delivery partnership with fast-casual chain Sweetgreen. Interestingly, the announcement comes the same week Sweetgreen closed a $150 million funding round and said it will launch its own in-house delivery service.

Uber made multiple other announcements yesterday that will affect Eats, including the news that it will merge its food delivery app into its main ride-hailing app. This “next generation of the Uber app,” as the company called it in a blog post, is currently testing two different versions of this new interface in “hundreds of U.S. and international cities.”

The company also highlighted allergy-friendly filters, which will let Eats customers communicate more effectively with restaurants about their dietary restrictions, and its forthcoming plans to make extras like cutlery and straws available only upon request.

With growth of its ride-hailing service stalling, including less-than-stellar earnings reports from Q2, it makes sense Uber is continuing to focus on its Eats business, though that business has yet to become profitable, either, and, as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi noted on the Q2 earnings call, won’t be for some time. Whether celebrity chefs and allergy filters can actually make any real progress towards changing that remains doubtful.

New Food Containers Promise to Keep French Fries Warm and Crispy

One easy way to ruin a relaxed takeout dinner at home are soggy french fries that lack a satisfying crunch when you eat them.

Novolex, a 16-year-old maker of packaging for the food, medical and building industries, hopes to prevent this food catastrophe with its new EcoCraft Fresh & Crispy clamshell containers, which it said in a press release keeps fried foods warm and crunchy. The containers do that with “micro-flute corrugation for superior rigidity and crush strength to maintain food integrity during transport and delivery.” Micro-flutes are the wavy paper in packaging that commonly protect all those items you order online.

“These containers even keep french fries crispy, warm and tasty,” said Adrianne Tipton, senior vice president of innovation at Novolex, in the release. “That’s a real innovation in food delivery.”

The company said the containers are designed for restaurants, convenience stores, supermarkets, caterers and delivery services, and are made with a minimum of 33 percent post-consumer recycled content.

A request for more information from Novolex was not returned by press time, so we don’t know when these containers will be available and how much they cost compared to other containers.

Better food containers are much needed now, as delivery apps are becoming more popular, even spurring the creation of ghost restaurants, which exist solely to serve delivery customers. Bloomberg cited data by market-data firm App Annie that food delivery app downloads have increased 380 percent compared to three years ago. DoorDash leads the pack, with Grubhub and Uber Eats not too far behind.

Another company, aptly named Soggy Food Sucks, also offers a solution to the problem with a condensation absorbing patch that can stick to the food containers.

Hopefully, with these innovations in place, you’ll only have a bad feeling about fries when you eat too many of them.

Uber Eats Getting Out of South Korea

Uber Eats will no longer be delivering food in South Korea, the company said today. Reuters was first to report the news, writing that company faced competitive pressures in the world’s fourth biggest online food delivery market.

Indeed, it was a daunting task for Uber Eats to gain meaningful traction in South Korea, where Woowa Bros.’ food delivery service Baedal Minjok enjoys a 75 percent market share. Helping strengthen that position, Woowa Bros. raised $320 million in December of last year in part to build more food delivery robots.

Presumably, however, it wasn’t just external forces that brought Uber to this decision. Since going public this year, the company is under greater scrutiny to turn a profit, or at least, you know, not lose $5 billion every quarter. Even though Uber Eats grew 140 percent year-over-year and generated $3.9 billion in bookings as of its Q2 2019 earnings report, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told CNBC that Uber Eats wasn’t going to be profitable any time soon, saying:

The Eats business is still a business that carries very significant growth going forward and that continues to attract a lot of capital. Not just in the US, but all over the world. With the eats business there’s a lot of capital chasing a lot of growth and we’re the leader on a global basis. So, I don’t expect that business to be profitable in the next year or year after frankly.

Looking to relieve at least some pressure, in June, Uber laid off 400 people across its marketing team in an effort to streamline operations. For more background on Uber’s long struggle with turning a profit, check out this recent episode of The New York Times podcast The Daily.

Among the bigger, more existential questions for Uber is exactly where in the world can it be the number one food delivery service. It faces tough competition just about everywhere around the globe. In the U.S., Uber Eats lags behind DoorDash and GrubHub. In Europe its up against the likes of Deliveroo and recently merged services Just Eat and Takeaway. In India it faces Zomato and Swiggy.

It’s not all grim news for Uber though. One differentiator the company has over its rivals is its ride-hailing business, which the company is further integrating with its food delivery business. Uber has been testing a $9.99 subscription service that would include unlimited meal delivery.

Uber Eats will cease operations in South Korea on October 14.

Swiggy Goes Beyond Food Delivery With New Service Swiggy Go, Expands Swiggy Stores

Today, India-based delivery service Swiggy took a few steps beyond the food world by launching Swiggy Go, an instant pickup and drop-off service that will deliver everything from laundry to house keys.

Swiggy Go is similar to another service, Swiggy Stores, which the company launched in February of 2019 for delivering household items like groceries and medicine within a one-hour timeframe. It’s also another example of a food delivery company branching out from restaurant food in an effort to become a kind of delivery superpower that can get any item to any person in major cities.

In India, Swiggy competes most closely with another food delivery service, Zomato, but adding non-food items to its delivery capabilities means it will also now be competing with Google-backed concierge service Dunzo, who operates in a handful of cities in India.

Food tech investment in India in general is heating up. In August, ecommerce startup FreshToHome raised a $20 million Series B round. Amazon said in July it is planning to launch a restaurant-delivery service in the country later this year, and Zomato successfully tested a drone pilot this past summer.

It’s possible Swiggy’s sudden move into non-food items is an effort to stand above the rising competition levels in India and become the go-to service in India not just for restaurant meals but for anything a person could want conveniently dropped at the front door. That may be necessary as heavyweights like Amazon — a name basically synonymous with conveniences — plans its moves in the country.

We’re seeing a similar trend start to take shape here in the States: last week, DoorDash announced it is working with Mercato to delivery groceries in 22 different states. It could be only a matter of time before Dashers start dropping non-perishables at your door, too. The next big question is, Will other third-party delivery services do the same?

Swiggy Go is currently available in Bengaluru. The company said it plans to expand the service to over 300 cities. Meanwhile, Swiggy stores will be available in all major metro areas by 2020.

WoodSpoon’s Soon-to-Launch Service Aims to Bring Home-cooked Food Delivery To NYC

Someone else’s kitchen could be the next place cooking up your food delivery order thanks to a soon-to-launch service called WoodSpoon. Set to begin service on September 16 in NYC, the service is an on-demand delivery marketplace for homemade meals as well as a platform for local cooks.

WoodSpoon CEO and co-founder Oren Saar, who moved to the U.S. from Israel to do a Masters degree at MIT four years ago, got the idea for WoodSpoon in 2016 after a roommate said he preferred Saar’s cooking to any option he might find on Grubhub, Caviar, or other food delivery services. Speaking over the phone this week, Saar told me he had a “white light” moment then as he realized there could be serious demand for people wanting to order homemade meals from local cooks.

He’d be the first to say the idea wasn’t completely original — plenty of companies have tried over the last several years to launch delivery businesses for home-cooked food, including Danny Meyer’s Umi Kitchen, HomeFood in the UK, and FoodByUs in Australia. Saar says he reached out to these and others to better understand the business he was trying to break into: what worked, what didn’t, why these companies eventually shuttered or pivoted towards other directions, and how he, along with his WoodSpoon cofounder and company CMO Merav Kalish Rozengarten, could do things slightly different. “We really based our entire product on the experience that others had before us,” says Saar.

The WoodSpoon platform is made up of two different apps, both developed in-house and available on iOS and Android platforms. The customer-facing app functions like most food order and delivery apps out there: users search for meals, order, and pay within the app. What’s available in terms of food depends on which cooks in the area are working at that moment, which means options for users change on a daily basis.

Currently, WoodSpoon has 30 cooks signed up to its platform, a mix of professional chefs with culinary degrees those who hold other jobs but enjoy cooking for others in their off hours. Saar himself is one of the the latter.

To find cooks, WoodSpoon relies on both those who apply directly to the company and channels like Instagram. “We’re looking for people that have really good rankings with good reviews,” says Saar. Anyone is welcome to apply; all are carefully vetted through a rigorous process that includes interviews, an evaluation of the food itself, and a kitchen inspection to ensure cooks are properly equipped and licensed to meet restaurant safety standards in New York. With legalities around home-kitchen food businesses in NYC somewhat nebulous, many of WoodSpoon’s cooks actually use their own commercial kitchen facilities to make the food.

Cooks manage all orders via a separate app and can decide to accept or pass on an order much the way an Uber driver takes passengers. Once an order is accepted, an onscreen timer tells the cook how much time they have to complete the order and package it up. (WoodSpoon provides packaging materials.) As that’s happening, the system talks to a delivery person (right now, WoodSpoon contracts its own drivers), who will know when to arrive at the cook’s space to retrieve the order and take it to the customer. Cooks set the price of each dish as well as the delivery fee, and WoodSpoon takes a commission on each order.

According to Saar, the hope is that users develop an affinity for a certain cook or type of food and re-order with the same loyalty they might have for a favorite local restaurant. “Our entire mission is to empower local cooks to share their food with others,” he says. “Once you get to the know them, you [will] want their food.”

The home-chef-as-a-business model may not be new, but it is only just starting to gain traction here in the U.S. Even in a densely populated metropolis like NYC, WoodSpoon won’t face a ton of competition when it launches in a few weeks. How quickly the concept catches on will depend on each state’s individual regulations around selling home-made food commercially. California, for example, green-lighted a home food bill in 2018, but in other states the practice is still illegal.

To start, WoodSpoon will be available in Manhattan’s East Village and West Village neighborhoods, with expansions planned for the near future, both within NYC and to other parts of the country.

Uber Eats to Deliver Food From Lawson Convenience Stores in Tokyo

During The Spoon’s recent trip to Tokyo, we took Anthony Bourdain’s advice and discovered the magic that is dining at Japanese convenience stores. In fact, the only thing that could have made those egg salad sandwiches any better was not having to go out in 100 degree August heat to get them.

Good news for those in Tokyo who also wilt going outside in Summer! Lawson, Japan’s third largest convenience store chain, will start offering delivery via Uber Eats. As Reuters reports:

Lawson said it will start selling around 100 products including bento boxes, fried chicken and tissue paper through Uber Eats starting on Thursday, initially for users near its stores in Shinjuku and Shinagawa before a later expansion.

Uber’s main business, ride sharing, is banned in Japan, so its food delivery business plays an outsized role over there. According to a recent Bloomberg article, Uber has partnerships with 10,000 restaurants in Japan, across ten cities in the country. Uber also has 15,000 couriers in the country, including many elderly folks who make deliveries by foot.

It hasn’t been smooth sailing for Uber since the company went public this past May. In fact, the company reported losses of $5.2 billion in its second quarter. And despite its 140 percent year-over-year growth, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he doesn’t expect Uber Eats to be profitable next year or the year after that.

This deal with Lawson won’t move the needle much on that rather grim scenario for Uber Eats, but it will make getting egg salad sandwiches a whole lot easier for those lucky people in Tokyo.

The Food Tech Show: Delivery Bots Head to College

This week the Spoon gang got together to talk about some of the most interesting food tech stories of the week.

On this week’s Food Tech Show we talk about:

As always, you can listen to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also download direct to your phone or just click play below.

Enjoy the podcast!

Domino’s to Launch E-Bike Program Across the U.S.

When it comes to getting food delivered, cars aren’t always the easiest, fastest way.

Domino’s underscored that point today by announcing a new program that will equip Domino’s locations across the U.S. with an e-bike option for delivery.

The custom e-bikes come courtesy of a partnership with Seattle-based e-bike maker Rad Power Bikes. According to a press release, Domino’s has been testing these two-wheeled vehicles in stores around Houston, Miami, and New York. The company will deploy the bikes throughout those cities as well as Salt Lake City and Baltimore later this year.

Bikes can run for 25 to 40 miles before needing a recharge. They include front and rear cargo areas, which are insulated so they can keep pizza hot and drinks cold en route to customers’ doorsteps. One e-bike can hold up to 12 pizzas.

With two out of three people likely to be living in cities by 2050, bike delivery via pedaled vehicles is becoming more of the norm in more places, and Domino’s isn’t the only company to be trying out the method for food delivery. Uber, who owns the Uber Eats platform, bought e-bike maker Jump in 2018, and Postmates has been testing e-bike initiatives since 2017.

E-bikes, meanwhile, are another area in which Domino’s is dabbling in ways to get pizzas to its customers faster. In June, the company announced a partnership with Chevrolet to make in-car ordering available to customers as well as a partnership with Nuro for autonomous delivery in Houston.

In the press release, Tom Curtis, Domino’s executive vice president of corporate operations, said the company saw improvement in delivery and service with the new e-bike program. He also noted that e-bike delivery allows stores to hire from a wider pool of candidates, including those who might not own a car or driver’s license.

Uber Q3: Uber Eats Grew 140 Percent Year Over Year, Has 320,000 Restaurant Partners

Uber had a bummer of a Q2 earnings call, with the ride logistics company reporting $3.17 billion in revenues but $5.2 billion in losses for the quarter. While the overall health of Uber is something we keep tabs on, The Spoon is more interested in its Uber Eats division, which generated $3.9 billion in gross bookings.

While that figure missed analysts’ projections, there was some good news accompanying it. From Uber’s earnings release:

In Q2 2019, Uber Eats Monthly Active Platform Consumers (MAPCs) grew over 140% year-over-year. Over 40% of new Eats consumers had never used Uber’s platform before. Uber Eats restaurant selection continues to improve, reaching 320,000 restaurant partners at the end of Q2 2019. New delivery fees (service and small-basket fees) resulted in improved Adjusted Net Revenue take rates quarter-over-quarter.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi provided this good news/bad news quote to CNBC during the call:

“The Eats business is still a business that carries very significant growth going forward and that continues to attract a lot of capital. Not just in the US, but all over the world. With the eats business there’s a lot of capital chasing a lot of growth and we’re the leader on a global basis. So, I don’t expect that business to be profitable in the next year or year after frankly.”

Despite that somewhat dour note, Uber Eats has had a busy third quarter so far. While the food delivery business lost its exclusive partnership with McDonald’s, it went national with Starbucks delivery, is experimenting with a dine-in feature, testing out an uber subscription service, launched a restaurant accelerator program in London, and partnered with OpenTable for delivery.

Now we’ll have to see if any of these moves deliver better results for the company.

Aramark Acquires Campus Food-Delivery Service Good Uncle

Just in time for school to start again, food services provider Aramark announced today it has acquired Good Uncle, an on-demand meal-delivery service that drops food to students at specific pickup points around college campuses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Good Uncle launched in 2016 and has raised a total of $2.2 million. The service, accessible via an iOS or Android app, aims to offer college and university students restaurant-quality meal options at student-friendly prices, including free delivery.

To order food, students first sign up with the Good Uncle app and choose items from a menu that rotates every couple of weeks. Certain campuses also feature 15-week membership plans that theoretically could function as an alternative, or at least a supplement, to a traditional student meal plan purchased from the university.

Good Uncle partners with local chefs to make the food and uses its own fleet of vehicles to deliver meals. All food is delivered at drop points on or around the campus. When a user purchases a meal, they choose one of these designated points, marked in the app, and are given an estimated time for how long the food will take to arrive at that point. The Good Uncle site claims an average of 26 minutes for most orders. Payment and order tracking are available through the app.

Aramark, meanwhile, is a longtime food services provider to universities and currently works with over 400 of them in the U.S., offering everything from dining hall services to convenience stores and coffee shops. But thanks to delivery, restaurant-quality food is easier and faster than ever for students to get their hands on, which means slimy spaghetti and endless bowls of cereal from the dining hall aren’t the only options anymore. For Amarak, acquiring a company like Good Uncle is a way to stay relevant as the campus culinary landscape changes.

And it’s definitely changing — specifically to meet the demands for delivery. In 2018, Grubhub acquired Tapingo, whose platform lets students order ahead at on-campus restaurants, cafes and dining halls. And universities are also a hot testing bed for delivery robots, with companies like Starship and Kiwi sending their bots to roam about the quad delivering meals and snacks to hungry students.

Right now, Good Uncle is available on eight campuses in the U.S. According to the press release, the company will operate independently of Amarak and maintain its own unique brand identity. Even so, linking up with a larger company like Aramark, which has a long history and wide reach with universities, could enable Good Uncle to expand to new campuses and compete with the plethora of delivery technologies currently headed back to school.