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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food delivery

Report: IKEA Is Testing Food Delivery in Paris

Occasionally, I’ll head to the edge of Brooklyn and wander through the DIY furniture maze at IKEA just eat lunch at their cafeteria. It’s inconvenient to get to (there are no subways, so you have to pony up for an Uber) and always crowded, but the good food makes the trip worth all the extra hassle.

But at some point in the (probably not) near future, myself and others could have the ability to get IKEA’s version of comfort food delivered straight to our doors. Today IKEA confirmed to Fast Company that it is testing out a food delivery business, not, sadly, in Brooklyn, but in Paris, France.

Spanish publication El Confidencial first got ahold of news that the company was considering an expansion of its food business into homes. According to the Fast Company article, the Paris delivery trial includes IKEA’s so-called Swedish foods, including beets, salmon, cabbage, and salads. Food will be delivered from IKEA’s city center location in Paris.

What’s unclear is if the food will be delivered hot and ready to eat or if it will be a part of IKEA’s frozen food product line, much of which can be delivered just like any other IKEA product. In fact, details about the delivery service are scant all-around. An IKEA spokesperson told Fast Company, “We do not have any further details to share at this point, as we are very early in the process.”

So no, scooters won’t be trolling about the streets of Paris delivering hot plates of Swedish meatball to your doorstep. Not yet, anyway.

This isn’t IKEA’s first foray into same-day food delivery. There’s the aforementioned frozen product line, which you can order like you would a piece of furniture from the company’s website. And at the end of 2018, the company partnered with Uber in the U.K. to deliver for a limited time Swedish meatballs in celebration of an end-of-the-workweek Swedish tradition called Fredagsmys (“cozy Friday”).

IKEA’s food-focused initiatives in general make it clear that the company wants to become more than just a giant blue box of a store that sells DIY furniture. IKEA announced a vegan version of its iconic meatball last month, which it will be trialing in early 2020. The company also has a number of goals in place around reducing food waste, including its Food is Precious initiative, which aims to cut waste in the company’s food operations by 50 percent by the end of the fiscal year 2020.

Supporting all that is IKEA’s ongoing accelerator program, which has had a number of food-related companies participate, in addition to startups doing retail innovation and those trying to create more sustainable containers like coffee cups.

Whether any of these food-related initiatives will tie into a food-delivery business remains to be seen. How the Paris pilot fares should tell us more, and Fast Company reported that if it’s successful IKEA may expand the program to Spain as well as other parts of Europe. That’s a long way off from Brooklyn, but occasionally I can be optimistic, so here’s hoping.

Dominos Partners with Nuro for Driverless Pizza Delivery in Houston

Domino’s announced today that it has partnered with Nuro to deliver pizzas in the Houston, TX area via self-driving delivery vehicles. Select customers will be able to choose the “autonomous” option from participating stores later this year.

Nuro’s R2, which is a pod-like low-speed vehicle that’s about half the size of a normal car, is built for hauling goods (there is no space for a driver). Customers receiving their Domino’s order via one of Nuro’s vehicles will be able to track the progress of the vehicle through the Domino’s app and, once it arrives, use a PIN to unlock the cargo bay holding their pizza.

Since there is no driver for this type of delivery, it also means there is no one who will run the pizzas to the front door, so customers who opt for it will have to (shudder) walk to the curb. Of course, with no driver that also means there’s no need to tip.

Houston is becoming a hotbed of autonomous action for Nuro, which has also been running a self-driving grocery delivery pilot with Kroger in that city since March. There was also a report earlier this year that Nuro and Uber were talking about a food delivery partnership in Houston later this year, though there’s been nothing official announced yet. All in all, it looks like that $940 million investment from Softbank in February is really helping Nuro scale up.

This Nuro partnership also reinforces why we put Domino’s on our Food Tech 25 list this year. The pizza company has already started testing chatbots, in-car ordering and delivery to non-addressed locations (like a beach). With self-driving delivery, Domino’s is taking that further down its delivery stack.

Zomato Successfully Tests Drone Food Delivery in India

Indian food delivery service Zomato successfully tested its drone program this week, bringing the world one step closer to getting their dinners dropped off by air.

From the Zomato blog post announcing the test flight:

We met all our parameters and were able to cover a distance of 5kms, in about 10 minutes, with a peak speed of 80 kmph, carrying a payload of 5 kgs – using a hybrid drone – fusion of rotary wing and fixed wings on a single drone.

As Zomato points out, for a crowded city like Delhi, congested streets and sidewalks make fast food delivery near-impossible. Drones, on the other hand, can fly high above the masses of people and cars to zip across town and deliver a hot meal before it gets cold.

Zomato’s news came on the same day Uber Eats announced it was looking to fire up its drone delivery program this summer in San Diego, and a week after Amazon said it would begin commercial drone delivery within months. For its part, Google’s Wing division has already been testing drone delivery in Australia, and earlier this year got FAA approval do to commercial drone delivery in the U.S.

Zomato, like Uber Eats, isn’t focusing on drone delivery to your front door. Zomato said that instead it would create a launch facility near a cluster of restaurants, and then drop off at a hub near densely populated areas. From there, presumably either a person or a rover robot would make the last mile drop off to the customer. This hub and spoke model has the advantage of requiring fewer flight paths that need regulation/supervision. 

I’ll admit that I was initially skeptical about drone delivery. The rules and regulation around them are complex and still being worked out. Drones make lots of noise. And if a drone malfunctions, it can crash into buildings or worse, plummet from the sky and injure people.

But every company getting into the drone business is obviously aware of this and going to great lengths to publicly highlight their safety protocols. The Zomato blog post made a point of this as well, writing:

The final design of our drone is lightweight, and treats safety as a top priority. It has inbuilt sensors and an onboard computer to sense and avoid static and dynamic objects, overall making it more efficient for autonomous flights. Although being fully automated, each drone is currently being tested with (remote) pilot supervision to ensure 100% safety. Over time, as we have more data, we might not need remote pilot supervision.

If safety protocols and flight paths can be worked out, then drones do provide an efficient way for restaurants to make deliveries in big cities.

Uber Aims to Start Testing Drone Food Delivery in San Diego This Summer

We knew Uber was accelerating its drone program, and as of today, we have a few more clues as to just just how fast the company is going. Bloomberg got a first-hand look at Uber Elevate, the company’s drone division, and how it would work for food delivery. Though the test flight Bloomberg watched was a bust because of the weather, there was still a bunch we learned from the article.

Uber has been testing drone food delivery with McDonald’s in San Diego this year, developing flight paths and even working on new forms of packaging to keep food at the right temperatures. As of now Uber’s plan isn’t to fly a drone directly to your driveway. Instead, it will fly to a drop-off location where an Uber Eats driver in a car will pick it up and bring it the rest of the way. Eventually, Uber predicts it will land the drone on the top of parked Uber cars.

This may seem overly complicated, but Uber says a drone can travel 1.5 miles in 7 minutes versus 21 minutes by ground. So a drone could fly past city congestion to shave off delivery time, even with a pick-up car involved.

But that’s still a ways away for the company, which has not gotten FAA approval for commercial delivery yet. Uber told Bloomberg that it believes it is three years out from drone delivery happening in select markets.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of issues that Uber will need to work out. Inclement weather, for one, the danger posed by mid-air collisions into trees, wires or other drones for another, and also the noise (just ask the town of Canberra, Australia about the drone of drones).

Additionally, Uber is going to have to contend with fleets of other drones in the sky, all vying to bring you a burrito. Last week, Amazon unveiled it’s high-tech transforming delivery drone and said it would be making commercial deliveries “within months.” And earlier this year, Google’s Wing division got FAA approval to make drone deliveries.

Uber Elevate will evidently unveil a new drone of its own later this year that can reach speeds of 70 mph. The race to bring drone delivery to market is certainly speeding up.

Amazon Shutting Down Restaurant Delivery in the U.S.

Amazon is getting out of the (crowded) restaurant food delivery game. According to Geekwire, Amazon will shut down Amazon Restaurants toward the end of this month. Amazon confirmed Geekwire’s story in a statement stating “As of June 24th, we will discontinue the Amazon Restaurants business in the US.”

Additionally, Amazon is shutting down its office lunch delivery service, Daily Dish, on June 14.

The closing of Amazon Restaurants in the U.S. follows its closure of restaurant delivery in the U.K. last year. It also comes at a time when tons of money is flowing into the restaurant delivery space. DoorDash raised an additional $600 million at the end of May (bringing its total amount raised to $2 billion), Uber, which has Uber Eats, just went public last month, and Postmates is about to IPO as well.

But the most interesting bit of relevant funding news came from Amazon itself, which was part of a recent $575 million fundraise by UK-based food delivery company Deliveroo. Firing up the speculation engine, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where Amazon’s moola helps Deliveroo make a move into the U.S.

That could actually be the smarter play for Amazon. Shuttering Amazon Restaurants isn’t even that much of a surprise. Even though Amazon is a logistics powerhouse, delivering a burrito is different from delivering a book on burritos. In a recent survey of restaurant delivery market share, Amazon lagged far behind Grubhub, DoorDash, Uber Eats and Postmates. Combining Deliveroo’s strengths in food delivery with Amazon’s network and presence in the U.S. would be a win/win for both parties.

I mean, Amazon’s already got the delivery drones, let Deliveroo fill ’em up with burgers.

Hey! Google Search, Maps and Assistant Apps Now Help Deliver Your Meals

Google announced yesterday that you can now order food directly through its Search, Maps and Assistant apps. The new functionality integrates with food-ordering services like DoorDash, Postmates, Delivery.com, Slice, and ChowNow, and more are scheduled to follow.

When using Google Maps or Search to find a restaurant, look for the “Order Online” button that ow appears with the results. If a restaurant is participating, you then choose the delivery service, as well as pick up or delivery times.

If you’re using Google Assistant, you say “Hey Google, order food from [restaurant].” And if you’ve ordered a certain meal through one of the delivery partners before, you can say “Hey Google, reorder food from [restaurant],” and your past orders surfaced for you to select again.

Google says the new functionality is available now in thousands of cities across the U.S. The company’s blog post only mentions using your phone, and the animated gifs embedded are all screenshots of a phone in action, so it’s not clear whether food ordering works with other Google Assistant platforms like the Google Hub or other smart displays.

Google’s direct integration with food delivery apps is also further recognition that restaurant delivery is here to stay, and is only going to get bigger. This news comes just a day after DoorDash announced that it had raised another $600 million in funding, indicating investors are still bullish on delivery’s future.

Google’s official mission may be “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” but lately it seems like the company is more interested in helping you eat faster. Yesterday’s announcement means you don’t have to take an extra step of opening delivery apps like DoorDash on your phone when searching for a meal. The company has also released its AI (for the most part) assistant, Duplex, which makes restaurant reservations for you. And if that weren’t enough, Google Wing has gotten approval to make drone deliveries, which are bound to include things like lattes by air.

O-M-Series G! DoorDash Raises Another $600 Million

Maybe DoorDash should change its name to MoreCash, because the food delivery company announced today that it has raised another $600 million in funding. This brings the total amount raised by DoorDash to $2 billion.

This Series G round brought in new investors Darsana Capital Partners and Sands Capital, which joined existing investors Coatue Management, Dragoneer, DST Global, Sequoia Capital, Softbank Vision Fund, and Temasek Capital Management. With the new money, DoorDash is now valued at $12.6 billion.

Today’s new funding comes just months after the company raised $400 million in February, which followed a $250 million round in September of last year.

In its corporate blog post announcement, DoorDash said its business has grown 60 percent since that Series F round in Feb., and that year over year, the company grew 280 percent, generating $7.5 billion in gross merchandise value sales (not all of that went to DoorDash as it includes the money that also went to restaurants).

All this growth is one of the reasons my colleague, Jenn Marston, pegged DoorDash as the food delivery company to watch, writing:

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.

DoorDash’s big raise also comes at an interesting time, to say the least, in the food delivery market. Uber’s IPO was a dud despite the strong growth of Uber Eats, taking a bit of the shine off gig economy companies. A more direct comparison would be Postmates, which has also filed to go public. The outcome of that IPO could be more consequential for the future of DoorDash.

In addition to rival food delivery companies, DoorDash faces internal issues as well. It’s been under fire for allegedly pocketing workers tips, and was the target of a boycott for those practices.

More money, more problems.

Update: Amazon to Invest in Deliveroo

UPDATE: Deliveroo confirmed this funding via press release sent out today. From that announcement:

  • Amazon is set to be the largest investor in Deliveroo’s Series G funding round
  • Deliveroo is raising a total of $575MM with participation from Amazon alongside existing investors T Rowe Price, Fidelity Management and Research Company, and Greenoaks
  • Deliveroo will invest heavily in expanding the company’s tech team at its UK Headquarters, expand further to reach new customers, and continue innovating through its delivery-only super kitchens, “Editions”

Original post:

Amazon is in negotiations to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in UK-based food delivery service Deliveroo, according to a report in Sky News. If true, Amazon’s money would be part of a larger £450 million (~$575M USD) fundraise by Deliveroo.

Deliveroo has raised close to a billion dollars already, and Sky’s sources were unable to peg a clear valuation on the company if this new round goes through. Deliveroo was valued at $2 billion during its last round of funding a year and a half ago.

For Amazon, this deal is basically an if-you-can’t-beat-’em-buy-into-’em strategy. In November of last year, Amazon shuttered its Amazon Restaurants delivery service in the UK after two years of trying to break into that market. As my colleague, Catherine Lamb wrote at the time:

Despite its big name and massive reach, it seems Amazon Restaurants couldn’t compete against existing food delivery companies in the U.K. like Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Since 2013, Deliveroo has carved out a sizable chunk of the U.K. food delivery market and become one of the fastest-growing tech companies in Europe. The company also differentiates themselves with their Editions project: geographically-targeted hubs of delivery-only cloud kitchens Deliveroo began rolling out in 2017.

Speaking of Uber Eats, Deliveroo’s reported fundraise comes on the heels of Uber’s IPO. Though Uber’s IPO was anemic, it still raised $8.1 billion that will help fuel Uber Eats’ expansion to 700 cities from the current 500.

Additionally, Uber is looking to expand into other food verticals, including cloud, or “ghost” kitchens, that would house delivery only restaurants that are only available on the Uber app. The company has even reportedly started leasing space in Paris to build out such a ghost kitchen.

This move into the virtual restaurant game would then pit Uber Eats against Deliveroo not only for restaurant delivery dominance, but also makes a play for Deliveroo’s own ghost kitchen program: Deliveroo Editions.

An influx of cash (sprinkled in with some Amazon-style know-how), then, puts a few more arrows in Deliveroo’s quiver to put up a bigger fight. Or, as my colleague, Catherine pointed out, bring the fight to the U.S., where Deliveroo isn’t active yet.

*The headline for the original version of this post said Amazon invested hundreds of millions in Deliveroo when that was still the report. We updated the headline to more accurately reflect the story.

Report: Uber Exploring Nuro Partnership for Self-Driving Restaurant Food Delivery

Just in time for Uber’s IPO today comes word from The Information (paywalled) that the mobility company has been chatting with autonomous vehicle company Nuro about a food delivery partnership. If such a partnership were to come to pass, using Nuro’s self-driving pods could be a way for Uber to lower driver costs and improve Uber Eats’ margins.

Nuro makes electric, low speed vehicles that are about half the size of a regular car and top out at 25 miles per hour. They are built for cargo and do not even have a space for a driver. According to documentation seen by The Information, the partnership with Uber would start later this year in Houston. This makes sense as Nuro is already operating there as part of its expanded pilot with Kroger to do self-driving grocery delivery.

Nuro’s partnership with Uber would be different from its program with Kroger. Instead of Nuro vehicles carrying food from restaurants directly to a consumer, they would instead take food from restaurants to a central hub. Once at this central hub, a human driver would take it the last mile, delivering it to doorsteps. The Information writes:

The hope is that the centralized hub for orders would allow drivers to handle more food orders than they currently do and potentially make more money because they won’t have to spend time going to each restaurant to pick up the food.

There aren’t many details, so this Uber/Nuro partnership could manifest in different ways, but two things immediately spring to mind. First is that it seems like more wear and tear on the food. Restaurants place meals in a Nuro that travels to the hub. Food is removed from Nuro and sits on a shelf until a human picks it up and puts it in their car. Human drives the food to the consumer.

Then there’s the temperature of the food because as we know, soggy food sucks. I’m sure Nuro’s can be outfitted with thermal zones to keep hot food hot and cold food cold, but that seems like a recipe for disaster when bundling together multiple entrees, sodas and desserts, especially when they need to be packed and re-packed.

The second thought that springs to mind is whether Uber would employ a similar hub system as Zume Pizza. Zume sets up mobile distribution points in various neighborhoods where delivery drivers come and pick up orders. Rather than leasing a brick and mortar location, Uber could set up a customized van or food truck that could be parked in different locations. Based on the data Uber has about what types of food people are buying, when and how often, Uber could change and optimize the location of these mobile hubs on any given night.

Then again, all this speculation is moot if the deal never comes to pass. Neither Uber nor Nuro would confirm the story with The Information. Uber is understandably a little pre-occupied with its IPO today, and thanks to the $940M investment from Softbank this year, Nuro has some runway to experiment with programs like this.

Regardless if this particular deal comes to pass, it’s nice to see companies are continuing to experiment and iterate the food delivery process. Whether its low-speed-vehicles, full-on self-driving sedans, rover robots, or even drones, the way we get our meals delivered to us is going to drastically change over the next five years.

I Used Kiwi’s Robot and it Felt Like the Future of College Food Delivery (Almost)

I live in a rural area, and a lot of the cool food delivery options aren’t available. So I was excited to see Kiwi’s rover bots scurrying around when I attended the TechCrunch Robotics and AI Sessions at UC Berkeley yesterday.

Having these robots on hand came in robot-handy during lunch when all the nearby eateries were choked with conference attendees and hungry students. Rather than waste my limited break standing in a long line, I downloaded the Kiwi mobile app to have a robot fetch me some grub while I did some work. In doing so I glimpsed into the bright future of college food delivery, and it is robots.

Well, almost.

Future college kids won’t know how lucky they’ll have it when campuses all operate fleets of robotic rovers making deliveries day and night. Robot delivery will be easy, fast, convenient and will free up much more time for beer pong studying.

Here’s how it worked.

I downloaded the Kiwi app and set up an account, which was pretty straightforward (though no Apple Pay option yet). After that, Kiwi’s marketplace brings up a list of nearby participating restaurants and alerted me to special offers. I placed two separate orders: a burrito from a local Mexican restaurant, and a boba tea from a different establishment.

On its face, robo-delivery isn’t cheap. There’s a $3.80 fee Kiwi tacks on which brought the total of my burrito to $16 and my boba to a little under $6. Twenty-two bucks for lunch ain’t nothin’, but if you know going into it that you are paying for the convenience of staying in one place and doing what you want (beer pong), while a robot runs across town, goes to two different restaurants and brings all your food back to you, the fee didn’t feel that bad.

I dropped a pin to mark the delivery location and placed my order. The Kiwi app did a good job of keeping me up to date on the robot’s progress:

Your robot is going to get your food!

Your robot has your food!

Your robot is ten minutes away!

Your robot is 3 minutes away!

Your robot is 0 minutes away!

Your robot is 0 minutes away!

Your robot is 0 minutes away!

That’s not a typo, this was when the experience broke down. The app told me the robot was basically at my feet… but there was no robot. The shortcomings of automated service were beginning to come into focus. Because it was stuck on 0 minutes away, there was no action I could take (re-center the map, have it make a ping! sound, etc.) to understand where it was and there was no apparent “Help Me” button I could push.

Thankfully, there was a human Kiwi operative nearby who was able to locate my robot roughly 25 yards away from where the app said it was. A company rep after the fact told me the issue was that there were too many Kiwis in one place (gathered for the conference), and mine got confused/stuck.

Which is too bad. Because the human helped me out, I didn’t really get the full experience, like seeing the live video feed broadcast by the robot, or use my phone to open it up.

Once open, I saw the only other bummer about my delivery (disclaimer: this is THE MOST first world problem in the world): My ice cold boba tea was place on top of the hot burrito. (Wanh-wanh. Please give to my GoFundMe). This is a bit of a nit pick, but robot delivery services are just starting out, they have to show that they can do a just-as-good-if-not-better-job than humans. That means getting restaurants to actually care about how they place food in the robot. There should be a cool side and a warm side.

Minor quibbles aside, it’s easy to see how robots will be a big hit on campuses. Colleges are contained geographic areas with lots of hungry people ordering food from on-campus or nearby establishments well into the night. Robots can easily access dorms and labs much more easily than a human driver needing to find a parking spot and still walk the quad to make a delivery. And if you bundle up multiple orders from a single restaurant, the economics make more sense for students.

All these reasons help explain, as Kiwi said from the stage at our recent ArticulATE summit, why the company is quietly expanding from two colleges to fifteen schools including Purdue, Cornell, NYU, Stanford, and Harvard. Of equal interest is the fact that students will be running the robot programs at these schools, taking care of maintenance and deployments. Kiwi didn’t elaborate on any student payment/financial relationship.

Kiwi isn’t the only rover robot company hip to the college scene. Starship is doing delivery at George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, and Robby is doing mobile commerce at the University of the Pacific.

Robot delivery isn’t perfect yet, but we’re in the first inning of whatever sport college kids will play in the future. Perhaps in ten year’s time my son will be writing me at our rural home to tell me about all the robot deliveries on his campus. He definitely won’t be playing beer pong, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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