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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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DoorDash Heads to Montreal, Strikes National U.S. Deal With Applebee’s

It’s only the middle of the week and DoorDash has already made multiple announcements around its continued expansion up, down, and across North America.

Now that it’s service is available in all 50 U.S. states, DoorDash is heading north and expanding into its first-ever non-English-speaking territory. The third-party delivery service today announced its official launch into Montréal, a predominantly French-speaking market and DoorDash’s first in the Canadian province of Quebec.

The addition of Montreal makes DoorDash available in 78 Canadian cities, including Winnipeg, Halifax, and Saskatoon. In a press release, the company said it plans to be in more than 100 cities across Canada by the end of 2019.

DoorDash will compete in those markets with Uber Eats, which already has a strong presence in Canada. But the rideshare giant isn’t the only company DoorDash will contend with. Delivery service Just Eat has long served Canada, and its recent $10 billion merger with Netherlands-based Takeaway.com creates one of the world’s biggest online food delivery services.

Back in the States, DoorDash continued its U.S. takeover this week by striking a national partnership with Applebee’s. While Applebee’s franchisees have independently worked with the service for some time, this new partnership is an official deal between DoorDash and Applebee’s parent company, Dine Brands Global Inc.

More importantly, the partnership addresses a growing concern among restaurant chains: retaining customer data and preserving brand integrity. DoorDash will power Applebee’s delivery, but customers will be able to order directly through the restaurant’s website and mobile app.

The partnership is now active at 1,300 of Applebee’s 1,700 locations. It is not exclusive; franchisees will continue their relationships with other third-party delivery services.

DoorDash also added partnership this week with sandwich chain Potbelly, who operates across the U.S. and has a heavy concentration of locations in the Midwest.

All these moves come on the heels of DoorDash’s recent acquisition of delivery service Caviar, a deal that expands DoorDash’s already giant geographic footprint. And last week, reports surfaced that the company was in talks to secure a line of credit ahead of a possible IPO. While DoorDash hasn’t made that news officially public, should an IPO indeed happen, the company will face the same issues around profitability its already public competitors Grubhub and Uber Eats face.

Expanding to almost every Applebee’s in America probably won’t solve the profitability issue. But it is noteworthy that Applebee’s isn’t the first chain to pick DoorDash as a national partner based on its perceived long-term viability as a food delivery service. In June, Chili’s expressed similar sentiments when it inked an exclusive partnership with the service. Again, long-term viability and actual profitability are two different things, especially when you get to the public markets, but it’s certainly not going to hurt DoorDash to have as many major chains and regions in its back pocket should an IPO come to pass.

Deliveroo Shuts Down Service in Germany

In a move that underscores how competitive the food delivery landscape is getting, UK-based service Deliveroo announced it will pull its business out of Germany on August 16, according to TechCrunch.

In an email sent to Deliveroo users, the company noted it was “on a mission to create the very best food delivery service in the world,” adding that “where we cannot do this to the level that we expect and you deserve, we won’t operate.”

As TC notes, Deliveroo had shuttered services in smaller German cities about a year ago to focus on places like Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt. The total exit from Germany is first time the company has completely shut down service in a country.

The move comes just a couple weeks after Netherlands-based delivery service Takeaway.com acquired UK-based Just Eat for about $10 billion, thus creating one of the world’s largest food-delivery companies with a leading presence in Germany along with Britain, the Netherlands, and Canada. The new company, dubbed Just Eat Takeaway.com, also has operations across Europe as well as Brazil, Mexico, and Australia. In 2018, Delivery Hero sold its German operations to Takeaway.com.

Deliveroo’s news today is no doubt in response to the massive merger, though the company said it didn’t rule out the possibility of returning to Germany at some point in the future. Deliveroo, which raised $575 million in May, said it would refocus its efforts on other markets in Europe and APAC.

The service will operate as normal until August 16, according to the email sent to Deliveroo users.

Updated: Food Delivery Service Just Eat Lays Off Staff Amid Redundancies

UK third-party food delivery service Just Eat has made a round of layoffs in the UK and Ireland following the recent merging of its customer and restaurant operations teams. TechCrunch reports that while it’s unclear how many individuals are affected, it could be “as many as 100 staff overall.”

At the end of May, Just Eat united its separate customer and restaurant support divisions under a single operation, creating numerous redundancies in the process. This round of layoffs, according to TC, was announced internally on Friday and is meant to do away with those redundancies as part of a larger corporate reorganization.

A Just Eat spokesperson declined to comment to TechCrunch on the actual number but did confirm the reorganization, noting that, “At our full year results we talked about organising and energising the business to execute our strategy at pace.”

The news comes right after Just Eat, who is based in London but operates throughout the UK and in several other countries, acquired corporate catering marketplace City Pantry. Previously, Just Eat had acquired Flyt and Practi, both restaurant-tech-focused companies.

Meanwhile, Just Eat has also faced backlash from investors this year as the company’s pace of growth has slowed. In February, activist investor Cat Rock Capital Management LP, who owns a 2 percent share in Just Eat, urged the company to “merge with a rival online meal-delivery company,” in the wake of Just Eat’s inability to find a permanent CEO after Peter Plumb stepped down and was replaced by interim CEO Peter Duffy. While Just Eat has yet to find that permanent CEO, TechCrunch also reported that Graham Corfield, previously Just Eat’s UK Managing Director, has been appointed to the role chief operating officer.

And despite Just Eat’s recent acquisitions, which suggest growth into new areas, the company has been under some heavy pressure in 2019 not just from investors but competitors as well. Amazon’s recent (and somewhat controversial) investment in Deliveroo further intensifies that competition, particularly as Deliveroo tries to take over more and more of the food delivery stack by offering its restaurants everything from cheaper ingredients to wifi services.

Just Eat’s previous aforementioned acquisitions have been focused mainly on technology that powers the delivery process. Whether that’s enough to give the company a fighting chance against Deliveroo’s operation remains to be seen.

Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Graham Corfield had been appointed to the role of chief executive officer.

Tech-centric Meal Kit Company Gousto Raises £30M in Fresh Funds

London, UK-based meal kit company Gousto announced this week it has raised a £30 million ($37.6 million USD) Series F funding round led by UK private equity investment firm Perwyn, with participation from existing investors BGF Ventures, MMC Ventures, Canaccord Genuity, and Unilever Ventures. The round also includes investment from British Instagram star Joe Wicks, better known as The Body Coach. This round brings Gousto’s total funding to $137.7 million.

Gousto’s meal kits — or “recipe boxes,” as they’re called in the UK — focus on healthy ingredients and more sustainable eating habits (hence Joe Wicks’ involvement). The service offers subscription plans for everything from vegetarian and plant-based diets to boxes for those who just want a healthier take on standard comfort foods. Users sign up via the app or website, choose a plan, and get pre-portioned ingredients delivered to their door with corresponding recipes each week. The company claims to be delivering 1.5 million meals per month in the UK. Price-wise, the service is actually a little cheaper than its main UK competitor HelloFresh: a four-person box with four recipes per week breaks down to £2.98 per serving, compared to £3.44 per serving from HelloFresh.

The company is also intensely focused on using tech to make meal kit logistics more efficient and also offer customers more choice. The company uses a public-facing, AI-powered personalization tool to make more relevant recommendations to individual customers. “We have been using the technology since our founding, and it powers everything from the recipes that customers see on our website to how boxes are prepared in our Picking Hub,” company CEO, Timo Boldt, wrote in a blog post last year. He also claimed, in a separate interview, that that 40 percent of the meals Gousto sells are recommended by AI. The company also uses AI on its back end, to automate the supply chain, as well as a forecasting.

Sustainability is the company’s other major focus area. On its website the company says most of its packaging is fully recyclable, and that it is looking for more sustainable ways to replace the few plastics it uses in the subscription boxes. That’s particularly important in the UK, where new controls are being introduced in an effort to drastically cut down on single-use plastics.

Unlike other meal kit companies, Gousto won’t head to the grocery aisle any time soon. Last year, HelloFresh started selling meal kits in grocery stores in addition to offering a subscription business. But Boldt has been vocal about his desire for Gousto to be an alternative to the grocery store, rather than another piece of its inventory.

Gousto told AgFunder this latest investment round will go towards further building out its technology side of the business, including hiring over 100 tech employees by 2020.

Just Eat Acquires UK Corporate Catering Marketplace City Pantry

London-based digital food delivery and takeout marketplace Just Eat announced today it has acquired B2B catering marketplace City Pantry, also based in London, for an initial cash consideration of £16 million (~ $18 million USD).

According to a Just Eat press release, the initial cash consideration was paid using existing resources, and further cash consideration could be payable if “certain operational and financial criteria” are met over the next three years.

City Pantry’s digital marketplace connects chefs and restaurants to corporate offices to provide food delivery to employees. Its services include not just food for events or large team meetings but also a regular meal planning tool, where offices can order breakfast and lunch regularly and ahead of time. All orders are done online and delivered to offices at scheduled times, whether that’s on the same day or, in the case of big events, even months after the order has been placed.

City Pantry currently serves companies like Eventbrite, Amazon, WeWork, and Slack, among others. To date, the company had raised £5.1 million (~$6.4 million USD).

Just Eat is Old Guard when it comes to third-party restaurant food delivery services, having started in Denmark in 2001 and expanded its marketplace across Europe as well as Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, and Brazil.

The company of late has been on a buying spree, acquiring Flyt this past January and Practi in April. In both cases, technology was at the center of the deal. Practi’s software lets Just Eat incorporate a full management platform — front and back of house — into restaurants it works with who don’t already have such technology in place. For those that do, Flyt provides the tools to integrate existing systems with Just Eat’s.

The City Pantry acquisition will help Just Eat strengthen its presence in the corporate catering sector in both the UK and internationally.

Thanks to This Delivery Service, You Can Now Order Food With a Magic Wand

Whether you need a simpler way to order dinner or just dream of transforming your house into Hogwarts, a new prototype from British Delivery service Just Eat seems like a promising way to order food.

The Just Eat Ordering Wand, currently in beta, is exactly what it’s name suggests: a wand-like device you can use to order food.

Users activate the 3D-printed food Wand by pressing a button and waving it. (Shouting “Accio!” as you wave the wand is optional.) The Wand uses Chirp™ soundwave technology to transmit an encrypted sound signal to the Just Eat app, triggering your most recent order. In other words, the wand talks to the app and re-orders the most recent thing you had via Just Eat.

Once payment is received, the LED tip of the Wand flashes to confirm the order has been placed. And as a guard against over-excited wand-wavers placing accidental orders, users are limited to one order per hour.

Why, you ask, is this superior to using an app? Well, if you’ve always wanted to pretend you live at Hogwarts, the answer is obvious. Aside from that, the Wand reportedly makes the food taste better by adding an element of fun to it. Just Eat enlisted the help of Oxford University food scientist Charles Spence, who referred to the product as a “mental palate cleanser” that improves your food:

“A wand has a special place in our psyche, thanks to the popularity of magic shows and Harry Potter.” he says. “It appeals to our inner child and evokes happy memories. Anything that makes your mind happier, makes your taste buds happier.”

Though right now the Wand can only re-order a user’s most-recent Just Eat order, group ordering, bill splitting, and real-time promotional offers are all future possibilities for the Wand, according to Just Eat. But seriously, if you’re either so busy (or so lazy) you need something faster than an app to help you with dinner, chances are, you’re eating the same thing for almost every night anyway.

The Wand is still in trial stage and not yet available to the public. Just Eat has said that if tests are successful, it could become available “in the near future.”

Now all we need is a One Ring beverage delivery service to go with it, and fantasy nerds everywhere will be set for life.

How Alexa’s New Developer Tool Will Power Voice-Assisted Food Delivery

Last week, Amazon debuted a new device location API that gives Alexa skills access to the location data in a consumer’s device settings, a move which could unleash a new wave of skill-powered food delivery services.

According to the developer documentation, the new API (application programming interface) will require that the user to give consent for the data when the request is made for the data. There are two levels of data granularity available: the full address (street location, city, state, zip) or country and postal code only. When a user enables a skill that requests access to location data, they will be prompted to give approval in the Alexa app (it cannot be done with voice alone), an extra step that provides an obvious safeguard to ensure the privacy of the consumer.

There’s a good chance the new location API could help add some excitement to what appears to be some pretty bare shelves when it comes to skill-powered food delivery. While there are approximately 268 or so food and drink related skills available to US users of Alexa, only 13 of these today are related to food delivery, and most of those are for things such as pizza delivery or Amazon’s own restaurant delivery service. With the new location API, it’s conceivable that a new wave of third party food delivery service related skills will be born.

Amazon gave early access to the new device location API to Just Eat, a UK based food delivery service provider with 27 thousand restaurant partners. By using the device location API, the Just Eat Alexa skill will be able to better optimize restaurant selection based on the customer’s location.

Alexa’s new Skill Dashboard

In related news, Amazon also announced a new skills dashboard, which will allow skill developers to better analyze trends, visualizations and pull away insights around aggregate skill usage.  One of those new data sets they will be able to analyze in the future will be location trends, which would be useful for food delivery companies which want to know what neighborhoods are more likely to use Alexa skill ordering vs more traditional methods.

All of this fits into my theory that Amazon is shifting its connected home commerce focus towards Alexa and away from Dash, which seems to have stagnated in terms of new adopters. More thoughts on that later.

How Starship’s Hub & Spoke Robot Delivery Model Could Change Food Delivery

As semi-autonomous delivery robots wind their way through the streets of Greenwich, a borough of London, England, delivering take-out meals to local diners, we are witness to a small glimpse of how such technology will forever change the food ecosystem.

While Starship Technologies’ partnership with Just Eat, a home delivery service connecting consumers to their favorite restaurants, has received a significant amount of media attention, robotic delivery has far broader—and perhaps more socially significant—possibilities. Starship’s hub-and-spoke vision—that is a scenario where large amounts of goods—in this case, food—are taken to a central location after which an army of semi-autonomous robots take the wares the last quarter mile to individual homes.

Two obvious scenarios of this application of Starship’s innovation are home grocery delivery and bringing needed fresh food to a growing number of food deserts (areas outside the logistical reach of farms and farmers markets). For the home grocery startups such as Instacart, robots allow workers to focus more on careful curation than transporting sacks of produce, canned goods and other staples to local residents. Much the way newspapers set up substations where the daily papers are taken in bundles to individual districts where they are sorted and doled out to kids on bikes, supermarket chains or other food distribution can create a value-chain efficiency that benefits their bottom lines while providing a valuable service.

It’s clear that such a scenario is in Starship Technologies’ plans. In early September, the company announced a partnership with Mercedes-Benz to develop “robot vans” which could bring the hub-and-spoke model to life. According to its press release, Starship said it will work with the German car manufacturer to build a transportation system in which specially-designed Sprinter vans will hold up to eight delivery robots. Based on location density and consumer needs, the vans will make their rounds dropping off, and later picking up, individual robotic delivery agents. While not mentioned in the release, a backend with carefully programmed robust logistical software and a “service center” where multiple robots can be simultaneously monitored will be needed.

A few enhancements would be needed to the current robot agent to truly optimize its capabilities. According to Starship Technologies, the semi-autonomous unit can hold up to 22 pounds and uses the insulation provided by the restaurant or its delivery service. In order to deal with larger deliveries—such as supplies to prep kitchens– or perishables, greater capacity and commercial insulation will need to be added to the units.

Moving from commercial needs to the greater good, the creation of a system to cut down on the growing number of food deserts will require more hands on deck. One of those additional hands might come in the form of delivery drones from the likes of Amazon, already in the business of efficient home delivery. The Seattle-based retail giant prides itself in leaving no address “unaddressable” when it comes to getting goods and services to the far reaches of the planet.

As with previous innovations, advances in food technology—particularly in logistics—first movers don’t always have an advantage. Lurking in the background—some not so subtly—are key players such as incumbents UPS and FedEx, as well as newcomers to the asynchronous delivery transport world including Uber and Lyft. In short order, autonomous vehicles of every shape and size will be in plentiful supply; how entrepreneurs in the food industry deploy them will separate the winners from the losers.