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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Plant-Based Eggs Starting to Crack Open The European Market

Here in the US, a version of a plant-based egg from Eat Just, Inc. has been on the market since 2013, starting with an earlier version from when the company was Hampton Creek. The company’s current product, which uses its flagship mung bean formulation, began selling in the US market in 2019.

But if you wanted to try JUST Egg in Europe, you were out of luck.

That’s about to change. That’s because the company just got approval for its mung bean protein from the European Commission. The approval, which follows an earlier greenlight last fall by the European Food Safety Authority, paves the way for the introduction of JUST Egg to the European market by the fourth quarter of 2022.

That’s not the only good news if you are looking for an egg alternative in Europe. Berlin-based Perfeggt has been working on an egg alternative that derives its protein punch from fava beans, and is starting to ship in Germany.

And then there’s Le Papondu (formerly known as Les Merveilloeuf). The French startup, which has been working on an alt-egg, started to work with restauranteurs in France to distribute its egg. The company originally planned on its egg arriving in a plant-based eggshell, but it looks like the egg is showing up, for now at least, sans shell.

Before both of these companies, there was Oggs. The UK startup, which uses aquafaba (the liquid left over from cooking chickpeas) as the secret sauce for its plant-based egg, started shipping in the UK market starting in 2020.

While Europe looks like it will see many new plant-based egg products on the market by the end of this year, newer products derived from techniques using precision fermentation or cellular agriculture might take a while longer. Europe’s strict GMO regulations apply to genetically modified microorganisms utilized in precision fermentation techniques used by the likes of The Every Company. Fiction Foods plans to introduce a cell-cultured egg in the third quarter of this year, but cultivated eggs are likely years from being approved for consumption in the European market.

The Food Tech Show: Cultured Meat’s Big Month

This week the Spoon editorial team got together to talk about the latest food tech news, including whether or not cultured meat would venture into, well, humans.

We all got grossed out (well, most of us) and decided a Mike Burger is a bad idea. But we did agree the food industry will have to address some of the more ethical questions around cultured meat as the ease and cost to replicate cells comes down over time.

Other (not so gross) stories we discuss on the pod also include:

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) or just click play below.

And Now, a Moment for Culture(d Meat)

If you’re doing it right, your Thanksgiving leftovers should be gone by now (so many turkey+stuffing+gravy sandwiches!).

Evidently, preparing for Thanksgiving in the middle of a year-long pandemic was a “logistical nightmare” for BIG TURKEY (Butterball, Perdue, Foster Farms, etc.), thanks to labor shortages and reduced family gatherings.

This got me wondering how long it will be before we see lab-grown, cultured turkey on the tables. Sure, cultured meat still has to overcome issues around scale, affordability and widespread governmental approval. And there are some who doubt whether cultured meat will ever become a thing at all.

But as an industry sector, cultured meat’s march towards our dinner table continues to make gains. Just this week, Eat Just announced today that it received the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured chicken in Singapore. And that’s just the latest development capping off what has been a robust year in the cell cultured meat space that has also featured:

  • Meat-Tech announced that it had successfully 3D-printed a cultured beef fat structure composed of bovine fat cells and bio ink grown from stem cells
  • Future Meat is using fibroblast cells to help bring down the cost of cultured meat
  • SuperMeat opened up a restaurant that serves its cell-based chicken (in exchange for your opinion)
  • NovaMeat started testing its 3D printing technology on cell culture + plant-based meat hybrids
  • BioBQ is developed cell-based brisket
  • Vow is developing a cell-based meat platform portfolio that includes goat, pork and kangaroo
  • BlueNalu announced it’s opening a new production facility next year for its cultured seafood
  • Mosa Meat said it achieved an 80x reduction in medium cost for creating lab-grown meat
  • Higher Steaks created the world’s first lab-grown bacon and pork belly

And that doesn’t even include the Ouroboros Steak art project that designed a kit for creating cell-based human meat. (Relax, it’s not real.) (We hope.)

While 2020 has been a pretty garbage year for the most part, that just hasn’t been the case for cell-based meats. As you can see from the assortment of stories, lot of companies are working on the problem from a lot of different angles, and all of them are making progress.

Now, we won’t be serving lab-grown turkey next year (or, presumably the year after that), but watching all these startups innovate on food tech that could help make food production more abundant and equitable is something to be thankful for.

Upcoming Virtual Events from The Spoon

The Ghost Kitchen Deep Dive – December 9th – An all day event looking at the fast-changing ghost kitchen & virtual restaurant market.

Food Tech Live 2021 – January 11th – Check out the latest food tech innovation to start 2021 at our annual food tech product showcase.

Tetra’s Tiny Dishwasher (Finally) Headed to Market

Heatworks’ Tetra countertop dishwasher is an example of a product that I totally don’t need and yet totally want.

We first covered the Tetra back at CES 2018, where we were enthralled by the diminutive dishwasher that could clean a few settings of dishes with only a half gallon of water in ten minutes. Fun!

Well, things have been quiet on the Tetra front since that CES and we were wondering if the device would ever actually make it to market. Turns out, the company was trying to solve the complex issue around soap dispensing in its machine.

This week, Heatworks announced that it has partnered with BASF to make that complicated mechanism and bring the Tetra to market. According to the press announcement, the improved Tetra “will be designed to deliver custom solutions and dosing, dependent on the selected wash cycle, ensuring each cleaning cycle is optimized. Tetra’s cartridges will last for multiple loads and consumers will be able to sign up for a subscription, so that cartridges are shipped to them automatically.”

That last part about a proprietary soap cartridge is a bit of a bummer. We’re not a big fan of Keurig-style solutions that lock you into a particular ecosystem. But we are happy to see that the Tetra is still alive and expected to be available in the back half of 2021.

Blendid.com, Jamba Juice, Walmart, AI, Robot, Smoothy, Kiosk, Dixon, Ca, 111220

More Headlines

Exclusive: Blendid and Jamba Co-Brand New Smoothie Robot – The robot is now open for business at a Walmart in Dixon, California. This is the first co-branded robot from Blendid and its second to open up at a Walmart.

Zuul Teams Up With Thrillist to Launch Rotating Ghost Kitchen – A series of 10 different NYC restaurants will each hold a two-week residency offering exclusive delivery-only meal offerings made out of Zuul’s ghost kitchen facility in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.

The Spoon’s Plant-Based Egg Round-Up – Plant-based eggs are poised to become the next big thing in the plant-based space, and it can be hard to keep up with all of the companies involved in this industry. We’ve pulled together some of the emerging and bigger players in this space.

3D Meat Printing Startup SavorEat Goes Public – The Israeli startup has had an initial public offering (IPO) on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), raising NIS 42.6 million ($13 million) in funding.

HungryPanda Raises $70M to Provide Food Delivery to Overseas Chinese Customers – The London, U.K.-based company will use the new funds to continue its global expansion, delivering authentic Chinese restaurant food and groceries to Chinese people living abroad.

A Plant-Based Egg Round-Up

According to the Good Food Institute, the plant-based egg industry is worth $10 million. This is a small number compared to the plant-based milk industry, which is worth a whopping $2 billion; however, the plant-based egg industry has grown by an impressive 228% in the past two years. With the entire plant-based food industry estimated to reach $74.2 billion by 2027, there is plenty of room for the plant-based egg category to continue to grow.

Plant-based eggs are poised to become the next big thing in the plant-based space, and it can be hard to keep up with all of the companies involved in this industry. We’ve pulled together some of the emerging and bigger players in this space.

Eat Just
Funding: $220M
About: After hitting the milestone of selling over 50 million plant-based eggs earlier this year, it is clear that Eat Just is one of the leaders in this industry. The company makes its liquid egg and folded egg patties with mung beans as the main ingredient. Eat Just products are available in retailers and restaurants nationwide (U.S.), and the company announced in October that it is expanding its products into Asia.

Zero Egg
Funding: $8M
About: Zero Egg launched its plant-based egg powder alternative earlier this year in October on World Egg Day. The egg alternative is crafted from soy protein isolate and pea flour and comes in two different varieties: EGG Basics as a direct replacement for scrambles or omelets and BAKE Basics for specialty baking. Zero Egg’s products are available globally to foodservice operators and manufacturers in the US, Europe, and Israel.

Float Foods
Funding: Undisclosed
About: According to Green Queen, Float Foods is the first company in Asia to create a plant-based egg white and yolk. This new product is called OnlyEg, and it is set to become available commercially in 2022. This plant-based egg was developed using a mixture of undisclosed legumes. In September of this year, Float Foods also launched an incubator for plant-based food innovators.

Evo Foods
Funding: $335K
About: This is India’s first plant-based egg start-up, and it has said it will be launching a plant-based liquid egg alternative sometime this year. Evo Foods uses biotechnology to extract protein from lentils for its formula. The product will first be made available D2C on its website and restaurants in India, and the company has plans to launch in the US by April 2021.

Crack’d
Funding: Unknown
About: The company recently announced at the beginning of November that it will be launching its liquid plant-based egg in the UK market. The egg formula is comprised of pea protein, nutritional yeast, and black salt. According to Crack’d, its liquid egg can be used for both baking and creating traditional egg dishes.

U.K. Regulators Grant Provisional Clearance to Amazon’s Highly Scrutinized Deliveroo Investment

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has provisionally cleared Amazon’s 16 percent investment in Deliveroo on the basis that the deal would not likely “damage competition in either restaurant delivery or online convenience grocery delivery,” according to a statement from the CMA.

Amazon was set to be the largest contributor to a $575 million investment announced in May 2019. By July of the same year, British regulators were scrutinizing the deal, claiming there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect that Amazon and Deliveroo would “cease to be distinct” were it to go through. Many months and a pandemic later, the CMA provisionally approved the deal in April 2020. Grounds for approval were that, thanks to the pandemic decimating the restaurant industry, Deliveroo would have had to exit the food delivery market without Amazon’s investment.

Though it seems the stakes are actually less dire for Deliveroo. The CMA said today that it has revised its provisional findings from April and found that “Deliveroo would no longer be likely to exit the market in the absence of this transaction.”

Even so, a lot has changed in the third-party since Amazon first announced its plans to invest in Deliveroo. The biggest development (besides COVID-19) has been Takeaway.com’s acquisition of Just Eat that was approved in April and created one of the largest food delivery companies in the world. That deal alone makes the U.K. food delivery market more competitive, and renders Amazon (a little) less of a behemoth come to gobble up marketshare. Uber Eats also operates in the U.K., as do a handful of smaller players. 

Another concern of the CMA’s was that through its investment, Amazon would cease to be competitive with Deliveroo. Thanks in large part to the Just Eat-Takeaway.com deal, that appears to no longer be the case.

“Looking closely at the size of the shareholding and how it will affect Amazon’s incentives, as well as the competition that the businesses will continue to face in food delivery and convenience groceries, we’ve found that the investment should not have a negative impact on customers,” Stuart McIntosh, Inquiry Chair for the CMA, said in a statement.

The CMA will now ask for views on the new findings by July 10. From there, it will make its final decision, which is due by August 6, 2020.

Takeaway.com and Just Eat’s $7.6B Merger Approved

The U.K,’s Competition Markets and Authority (CMA) has approved Takeaway.com’s £6.2 billion ($7.6 billion USD) takeover of British food delivery service Just Eat. The merged company also announced it had raised €700 million ($756 million) in new outside funding in the form of new shares and convertible bonds.

The deal was originally announced in July of 2019. A bidding war with tech investment firm Prosus followed shortly thereafter, which Takeaway.com won — only to have the CMA open an investigation into the deal to see if it would “result in a substantial lessening of competition” in the U.K. food delivery market. 

Takeaway.com previously operated in the U.K., but exited that market in 2016. The CMA’s investigation concerned whether the Dutch company would have re-entered the U.K. market of its own accord without the Just Eat deal. 

“In this case, we carefully considered whether Takeaway.com could have re-entered the U.K. market in future, giving people more choice,” the CMA’s mergers director Colin Raftery said in a statement. “It was important we investigated this properly, but after gathering additional evidence which indicates this deal will not reduce competition, it is also the right decision to now clear the merger.”

The approval comes just days after the CMA provisionally approved Amazon’s investment in delivery service Deliveroo, which has been under investigation for similar reasons. In the case of this deal, the approval seems more tied to the COVID-19 pandemic than anything else, with the CMA concluding that the virus is having significant enough impact on Deliveroo’s business to endanger the third-party delivery company. 

Coronavirus doesn’t appear to be the driving force behind the Just Eat-Takeaway.com deal, which was never as dangerously on the rocks as Amazon’s anyway. According to CNBC, the new funding will be used to in part pay down debts as well as pursue “strategic opportunities.”

Uber Eats Loses Exclusive Contract With McDonald’s in the UK

Uber Eats took another competitive hit this week when it lost its exclusive rights to deliver McDonald’s orders in the UK. Rival delivery service Just Eat announced on Tuesday it had struck a deal to become the QSR chain’s second delivery partner in Britain, according to a report from CNN Business.

Joseph Barnet-Lamb, an analyst at Credit Suisse, told CNN that orders from McDonald’s account for about half of the 30 million deliveries Uber Eats does in the UK each year. “This is all part of Just Eat taking back control of the competitive landscape,” he said. 

Just Eat is already a leader in the UK food delivery space, and its planned merger with another European food delivery heavyweight, Takeaway.com, could give the company even more competitive muscle that players like Uber Eats and Deliveroo will have to fight. (British antitrust watchdog the CMA certainly thinks so, as the deal with Takeaway.com is currently under investigation, though it’s still expected to go through.)

This is the second time Uber Eats has lost an exclusivity contract with the Golden Arches. In July 2019, McDonald’s added DoorDash as a second delivery partner in the U.S., then later added Grubhub, too.

Elsewhere, Uber shut down its Eats service in South Korea, laid off staff, and, this year, just sold its India business to rival service Zomato.

None of this is particularly surprising. Uber is under pressure from investors to prove it can be more than just a cash-burning business — in other words, profitable. Part of that process includes shutting services down in markets where they don’t perform well or fall behind the local competition.  

That doesn’t mean Eats is leaving the UK anytime soon. However, Just Eats processed over 123 million orders in the UK in 2018. If its deal with Takeaway.com goes through, it will create one of the largest food delivery services in the world, and a competitive threat that goes far beyond the question of who’s delivering Big Macs.

British Authorities Open Investigation Into Just Eat-Takeaway.com Merger

Fresh off the heels of a bidding war for the acquisition of UK-based delivery service Just Eat, Takeaway.com, who also offers on-demand restaurant food delivery, faces a new opponent: British regulators.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said late last week that it is investigating the proposed Takeaway.com-Just Eat Merger to see whether the deal, worth £6 billion (~$8 million USD), would “result in a substantial lessening of competition” in the UK food delivery market, according to The Associated Press.

Specifically, the CMA is looking into whether Takeaway.com would have re-entered the UK market, which the service left in 2016, without the Just Eat deal.

This isn’t the first time the CMA has brought the hammer down on a major deal between two food delivery companies. In May of 2019, Amazon announced a major investment in Deliveroo, only to have it flagged by the Authority, who said it “presented reasonable grounds” that such a deal would make the two companies “cease to be distinct” from one another. In other words, the deal would undercut competition from other food delivery services in the UK, including Just Eat.

The Amazon-Deliveroo investigation is still ongoing, and at last check the deal was said to be in serious jeopardy.

For Takeaway.com and Just Eat, the situation seems a little less dire, at least for now. Takeaway.com said the deal would still go through but be delayed by one week. Takeaway.com said it was confident that clearance on the merger “will be obtained.”

Takeaway.com first announced its intentions to acquire Just Eat in July 2019 in an all-share deal that would create a new company, Just Eat-Takeaway.com. The company then found itself in the middle of a bidding war with Naspers-backed tech investment firm Prosus, who over the last several months has offered multiple counter bids for Just Eat.

While that bidding war was put to bed recently, it, along with this latest investigation from the CMA, underscores how fiercely competitive the food delivery market is getting, and just how thick in the middle of a consolidation process it is. With demand for off-premises orders set to drive restaurant sales for the next decade and investors applying pressure for these companies to show the third-party delivery model can be profitable, companies across the space are shutting down services, selling their operations, and, at least in the case of the big guys, gobbling up the smaller players. 

For its part, Takeaway.com said it was confident that clearance on the merger “will be obtained.” Now we’ll have to wait and see if that really does mean a simple one-week delay or if the two companies have a longer, more complicated battle on the horizon.

Week in Restaurants: WeWork Shuts Down Spacious, Just Eat Rejects Another Takeover Bid

Have I got news for you: Today is the last day you can get a free burrito from Chipotle by entering a code into Instagram. Snack on that while you also chew on a few final bits of news that happened this week in the restaurant world.

WeWork Shuts Down Spacious
Just four months after acquiring it, WeWork is shutting down Spacious, a startup that turns high-end restaurant space into coworking locations for members. The shutdown is one of many cost-cutting moves the much-maligned WeWork is making to offload businesses it has acquired over the last few years. Spacious’s whole staff — 50 employees total — have been laid off. Current Spacious customers will be given prorated refunds and discounts on some WeWork memberships, according to a statement from WeWork.

Delivery Service Just Eat Rejects a Takeover Bid — Again
Naspers-owned tech investor Prosus has once again made a hostile bid for food delivery company Just Eat. Once again, Just Eat has rejected the bid, saying its board “continues to believe that the Prosus Offer fails to reflect appropriately the quality of Just Eat and its attractive assets and prospects.” This is the third bid Prosus has made for the company in the last few months as it tries to win Just Eat away from Takeaway.com, who announced plans to acquire Just Eat in July. Prosus’ latest counter bid was for £5 billion (~$6.6 billion USD). 

Jimmy John’s Expands Loyalty Program Nationwide
Following a six-month test, sandwich chain Jimmy John’s this week did a nationwide expansion of its Freaky Fast Rewards program, which lets members build up rewards points, track them, and pay for food via the Jimmy John’s mobile app. One-tap technology in the app enables users to make in-store payments via Google Pay and Apple Pay. According to a press release, more than 1.8 million people have signed up for the program since it launched in March of 2019.

Also This Week:

  • Charlotte, NC-based chain Clean Juice has teamed up with multiple third-party delivery services to widen its off-premises reach.
  • Restaurant management platform Waitbusters integrated its online order feature with Google Search and Maps.
  • Swag alert: My friends at Nation’s Restaurant News have the definitive list of QSR-branded merchandise available this holiday season.

Food Delivery Service Just Eat Looks to Be in a $6B Bidding War

Food delivery service Just Eat just found itself at the center of a what could become a massive bidding war for the company.

The service, which is based in London and has operations in multiple countries, confirmed in July a £9 billion ($11.6 billion USD) all-stock deal to merge with Dutch delivery company Takeaway.com, saying the two companies had reached a preliminary agreement. But this week, tech investment firm Prosus, a spinoff of tech conglomerate Naspers, showed up to the party as a seemingly unwelcome third guest. Or as the Financial Times put it, Naspers “has tried to gatecrash a merger of two of Europe’s biggest food delivery groups.”

According to FT and others, Prosus had been in talks with Just Eat previously. After failing to reach an agreement, the former went to directly to Just Eat shareholders with a counter offer of £4.9 billion (roughly $6.3 million USD), in what’s called a hostile bid.

Just Eat rejected the bid, saying in a statement that it “significantly undervalues Just Eat and its attractive assets and prospects both on a standalone basis and as part of the proposed recommended all-share combination with Takeaway.com.”

Prosus offered 710 pence per share in cash for Just Eat. In comparison, Takeaway.com’s original all-stock offer from July valued Just Eat at 731 pence per share, but thanks to Takeaway’s declining stock, that number has dropped all the way down to 595 per share in the last few months.

On the surface, that would make the Prosus offer more attractive — in the short term. But Just Eat has said its decision to stand by the Takeaway deal is based on “compelling strategic rationale.” As Just Eat noted in a press release from July, when it announced the merger, the combined group has “compelling strategic logic and represents an attractive opportunity for both companies to build on the strong individual platforms of Just Eat and Takeaway.com with the potential to deliver substantial benefits to respective shareholders, customers, employees and other stakeholders.”

In other words, combining two companies who already hold a massive global presence on their own in the food delivery sector would create an entity strong enough to stand up to competition. Deliveroo raised a £450 million (~$575M USD) round this year, a sizable chunk of which came from Amazon. Uber Eats also has a massive presence across every livable continent on the globe.

Even so, shareholders still have to approve the deal. According to FT, some have “voiced opposition” to it, including Aberdeen Standard Investments and Eminence Capital, who “dismissed” the deal as grossly undervaluing Just Eat. Shareholders will vote on December 4 whether or not to approve the deal.

Prosus has stakes in multiple food delivery companies, including Swiggy and Delivery Hero, but the company isn’t yet considered a heavyweight in the food delivery sector. Its deal, while financially attractive, would likely lack the synergy Just Eat seems to think is so vital to the Takeaway merger.

At the very least, Takeaway could very well have to raise its offer price in the wake of Prosus’ counter offer, igniting a bidding war that could have a ripple effect across the industry as competition among food delivery companies heats up.

Order-Ahead Food App Ritual Expands to Europe, Hong Kong

Toronto, Canada-based mobile app Ritual, which lets users order ahead for restaurant pickup food, announced this week it is expanding service to Germany, The Netherlands, and Hong Kong.

The new markets are just the latest in what’s been a steady expansion for the company ever since it started rolling out service to the U.S. in 2017. In January, the company expanded to the UK and Australia, and said it expected to triple its restaurant count by the end of 2019.

Like many restaurant-focused mobile apps, Ritual lets users browse participating restaurants, order ahead, leave special instructions (no pickles please!), and pay within the app. On top of those fairly standard offerings, it has a few features that help it stand out from the crowd.

For one, it’s geared towards the lunchtime office crowd in a big way, thanks to a social feature baked into the app called Piggyback. Workers in the same office or location can gather within the app and decide on a restaurant. They can then choose when to order food, place their orders, and designate a person to go and pick the meal up. The app stores past orders, making it easy for teams to reorder entire meals. So if Fried Chicken Friday is a thing for your team and you want to spend less time collecting everyone’s orders, Ritual’s the app for that.

Ritual is also a way for smaller and/or independent restaurants to test off-premises ordering. The app’s pickup-only focus makes it cheaper for restaurants to participate (no drivers to pay), so they can easily gauge how much their customers want off-premises orders and which meals work best in a to-go environment.

So far Ritual has raised a total of $112.9 million, its last round being a $70 million Series C in June 2018. According to the press release, the service is now available in over 50 cities, including its new markets. The addition of Germany, Hong Kong, and The Netherlands also marks the start of the company’s goal to expand to a greater number of non-English-speaking markets in future.

Its push to European countries comes at a time when the food delivery and pickup market on that continent is seeing some serious competition. In July of this year, third-party aggregators Just Eat and Takeaway.com merged to form one of the largest restaurant-delivery services in the world. Both already had a significant presence in Europe prior to the merger. In the same month, Just Eat also acquired UK-based corporate catering marketplace City Pantry, a service that also appeals to the office crowd. And amid much competition, Deliveroo pulled out of Germany in August.

As I mentioned above, though, the simplicity of Ritual’s app could make it appealing to restaurants that can’t or don’t want to fork over fees associated with some of those other apps. The big question around Ritual’s expansion, which is yet to be answered in these new markets, is if a pickup-only app is enough to compete in today’s delivery-crazed food world.

DoorDash Launches Delivery In Melbourne, Its First City Outside North America

As of today, DoorDash is now available in Melbourne, Australia, the first city in which the third-party food delivery service is operating outside of North America.

In a blog post, DoorDash said it has already added “thousands of restaurants” in Melbourne to its platform, including national chains like Nando’s and Betty’s Burgers.

DoorDash joins a competitive food delivery market that includes Uber Eat and Deliveroo, both of which have operated in Australian for years. The latter is even part of Australian airline Quantas’ frequent flyer program. DoorDash will also have to contend with MenuLog a subsidiary of Just Eat, whose recent acquisition of Takeaway.com makes it one of the biggest third-party food delivery companies to contend with outside of the U.S.

As to why DoorDash chose Melbourne as its first overseas market, the company did not say, though Reuters points out that the “city of 4.5 million people has been a popular entry point for global companies in the so-called ‘sharing economy.'”

The Australia expansion comes on the heels of DoorDash’s recent launch in Montreal, Canada, the service’s first non-English-speaking location. Not that the company is slowing down its march across America: Since becoming the first U.S.-based third-party delivery service to operate in all 50 states, DoorDash has been striking deals left and right with major restaurant chains. The company also recently acquired autonomous vehicle startup Scotty Labs and is potentially looking at an IPO.

In August, the company outlined a new policy for its pay structure for drivers, a move largely in response to controversies surrounding the way the service handles worker tips.

In this week’s blog post, DoorDash said it expects to expand “throughout the suburbs of Melbourne, its surrounding regional cities, and Australia broadly” over the rest of 2019 and into 2020.