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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

restaurant delivery

Delivery Hero Launches its Own VC Fund, DX Ventures, to Invest Across Food Tech

Global food delivery service Delivery Hero announced today the official launch of its own venture capital fund that will invest in food, delivery, and other areas of the food industry. Called DX Ventures, the fund has a dedicated pool of long-term capital to devote to companies working in on-demand services, food tech, fintech, artificial intelligence, and logistics, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Duncan McIntyre, Managing Director of DX Ventures, said the fund was something Delivery Hero has been thinking about for a number of years, and that investments into other companies is a strong part of how the service has been built over the years. “We’ve made about $500 million [in] minority investments over the last couple years,” he told me over the phone recently. Out of the success of those investments came the next obvious step: formalizing the concept of Delivery Hero as an investor. Hence, DX Ventures.

The fund will start off with a focus on early-stage companies, such as those at Series A level. “The aim of the fund is to look at industries and areas that are going to be disruptive over the next 10 years,” McIntyre said. That could include food delivery, but it might also include adjacent areas, such as alternative proteins, packaging alternatives, or supply chain features.

He added that DX Ventures will also look for companies that compliment the core Delivery Hero platform. Delivery Hero, for example, has added grocery delivery to its list of services (see the company’s $360 million acquisition of InstaShop last year). McIntyre suggested that companies contributing to the grocery delivery sector might be appropriate candidates to receive investment from DX Ventures. Other examples might include companies that can improve the restaurant delivery experience by providing better tracking, shorter delivery windows, lower price points, or healthier food options. “There’s a lot of efficiency to be gained in the food system,” said McIntyre.

All of the above examples are hypothetical at this point, as DX Ventures has yet to announce any companies it is investing in. At the moment, the fund is actively looking for companies in which to invest over the long term.

Potential companies can be located anywhere geographically speaking, though the fund will also focus on markets where Delivery Hero already has a presence. At the moment, that includes no less than 50 countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa. 

DX Ventures will be independently managed from Delivery Hero.

Yandex Robots Roaming Russia Delivering Restaurant Meals

Robots from Yandex, a tech giant which is kind of like Russia’s Google, have started making restaurant deliveries in the Russian cities of Moscow and Innopolis, the company announced in a corporate blog post today.

The Yandex.Rover robots are six-wheeled, cooler-sized robots similar to those from Starship and Kiwibot. They work in conjunction with Yandex.Eats, the company’s restaurant and grocery delivery service that has more than 30,000 merchants across 166 cities. Via the YandexEats app, users select their desired restaurant and choose the delivery-robot option to get their food delivered by one of the company’s bots. When the order arrives, recipients unlock the bot with their mobile phone.

Yandex’s blog post didn’t mention how many delivery robots are in its fleet in each city, or how big the service areas are. It did note that its robots are delivering in the White Square district, which is in central Moscow and home to many cafes and restaurants, and that robot delivery is free in Innopolis. Yandex said its robots can also handle inclement weather, which I imagine is an important feature for Russian winters.

The global pandemic has increased interest in robot delivery in part because of its contactless nature. Robots don’t get sick and can theoretically work around the clock. In recent months we’ve seen a number of rover robot deployments in different parts of the world. The City of San Jose partnered with Kiwibot over the summer to enable restaurant delivery. Save Mart in Modesto, California started delivering groceries via Starship’s robots. Pink Dot started making robot deliveries via Postmate’s Serve robot in the West Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. And in South Korea, Woowa Brothers started making robot deliveries to an apartment complex in Seoul.

As part of its announcement, Yandex said that in addition to delivering restaurant meals, its robots would also be making grocery deliveries in the future.

Minnow Raises $2.2M Seed Round for Contact-Free Delivery Pods

Minnow Technologies, which make IoT-enabled, contactless delivery lockers, announced today that it has raised a $2.2 million seed round led by Elevate Capital with participation from Portland See Fund and the venture capital arm of Lincoln Property Company. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Minnow to $3.4 million.

With the pandemic still raging across the country, contactless delivery is basically table stakes for food operators and consumers alike. Minnow’s pods are installed in high-traffic locations and allow food deliveries to be stored in specified cubbies and unlocked by customers using their mobile phones.

Minnow’s go-to market strategy (and company name) has evolved since its inception back in 2017. The company was first called Veebie and the food locker was meant to be mobile. When the company changed its name to Kadabra, it took the wheels off the locker, installing them in locations and added IoT capablities. When it re-branded as Minnow (and moved headquarters from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon), and officially launched in March of this year, it installed seven Minnow pods in office buildings in the Portland, Oregon area.

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, meant that office buildings weren’t exactly bustling any longer, so the company started looking at apartment and other multi-family residential buildings as installation locations. In today’s funding announcement, Minnow added that its pods were also available for ghost kitchens and other cafeterias (a la Brightloom) to act as a contactless intermediary between kitchen and delivery people or customers. Minnow even added UV lights to the interior of its cubbies to further help with sterilization.

Minnow is certainly raising money at the right time. With restaurants going back and forth between opening and closing, off-premises eating is the really the main way for them to stay afloat. Delivery cubbies like Minnow’s also have the added benefit of flexibility for the customer. Instead of having to be at the door when the delivery person comes, food can be dropped off in the insulated cubby and picked up when its most convenient (the Minnow FAQ says that the cubbies are designed to hold food for 90 minutes).

With its move into residential buildings, having Lincoln Property Company, which has buildings in 28 states, is a good investor to have. Even after the pandemic recedes (whenever that will be), people will still be getting food delivered, and having a special locker in your lobby will be a nice perk for residents.

ezCater Lauches Relish to Reimagine Corporate Lunches

In case you hadn’t heard, the buffet as we know it is dead. That includes the catered office buffet. Now, as people head back to the office, companies need new ways to provide lunch that’s more sanitized, more socially distanced, and still quick and convenient for workers.

Online catering marketplace ezCater launched one such way this week. Relish, as the service is called, lets employees order from a selection of local restaurants then delivers all food directly to the office, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Using Relish, companies can choose which days of the week they want lunch catered to the office and set a budget for how much employees can spend. Relish then offers meal suggestions from local restaurants near the office. Employees can choose their food from the suggestions, and all meals arrive individually packaged to a central drop-off point in the office. 

Companies cover the delivery costs and can choose to subsidize some or all of the meals.

Like other areas of foodservice, office catering is undergoing a reinvention, thanks to the pandemic, and catering services are trying to become integral parts of companies’ return-to-work strategies. With more employees working from home for the foreseeable future, some brands, like Ox Verte and Slow Up, have created direct-to-consumer channels that deliver to employees home offices. Recently, too, Uber for Business launched its Vouchers program, which lets companies customize the types of meals they want to cater, whether it’s for a single employee working from home or a 1,000-person virtual event.

It’s too soon to tell which of the above strategies will prove most popular among corporate customers looking to subsidize employee lunches. Getting large numbers of people back to the office before there is a COVID-19 vaccine could prove challenging. The ability to pivot in this pandemic world is especially important for ezCater, which has raised roughly $320 million in funding. It’s tough to scale your corporate catering when corporations aren’t going into their offices.

On the flip side, once a vaccine is found and more people physically head back to work, the company could emerge as a leader thanks to its early start in redefining the concept of office lunches.  

Third-Party Delivery Integrator Deliverect Raises €16.25M

Deliverect, which makes software that integrates orders from multiple third-party delivery services into a restaurant’s POS system, announced today that it has raised a €16.25 million (~$17.63 million USD) Series B round of funding. EU-Startups was first to report the news, writing that the round was led by OMERS Ventures, with participation from Newion, Smartfin and the company’s founders. This brings the total amount raised by Deliverect to €19.9 million (~$21.58M USD).

Based in Belgium, Deliverect‘s software alleviates the so-called “tablet hell” situation many restaurants face when partnering with third-party delivery services. Typically, each different delivery service provides the restaurant with its own tablet to process incoming orders. Those orders then have to be manually inputed into the restaurant’s main POS system. The more delivery services a restaurant adds (Uber Eats, DoorDash, Deliveroo, GrubHub, etc.), the more confusing this proposition becomes.

Deliverect’s software acts as a middleman in this scenario. It’s software ingests the third-party delivery orders and unifies them into a single stream that automatically goes into the restaurant’s POS system. The result is that restaurant staff don’t need to monitor multiple platform for incoming orders.

Deliverect uses a SaaS model and as EU-Startups writes:

So far the startup has processed more than 3.5 million orders, supporting UK brands like Absurd Bird, You Me Sushi, Taqueria, and Crêpeaffaire. In addition, the company works with Unilever, which through Deliverect is able to integrate with Deliveroo and Uber Eats and deliver Ben & Jerry’s and Magnum ice creams directly to customers.   

Deliverect says it will use its fresh funding for product R&D, to strengthen its position in Europe and expand internationally. The company will face tough competition here in the U.S., where a number of entrenched players offer the same third-party integration services. Ordermark, Chowly and Olo are just a few of the startups promising to douse the flames of tablet hell (almost all of which are running pricing specials now to entice new, cash-strapped customers).

But there is a bigger, more existential question that dominates any talk of restaurant tech these days, and that’s the very future of restaurants themselves. Here in the U.S., at least 3 percent of restaurants have permanently closed. Even delivery services haven’t been spared as Deliveroo just laid off 350 people (15 percent of its staff). And while delivery and takeout have been a lifeline for some restaurants, this pandemic has restaurants re-evaluating their entire tech stack to see exactly what they actually need.

Deliverect’s ability to raise this much money right now speaks to at least some optimism in the world, which, is a delivery we can all welcome.

Report: New York City Council Eyes Capping Commissions Charged by Grubhub, et. al.

The New York City Council wants to limit the commission fees that third-party delivery services like Grubhub and DoorDash can charge restaurants while dining rooms remain closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the New York Post, the bill being considered would seek to to cap the delivery fees that third-party services charge restaurants at 10 percent.

Currently, the commission fees third-party delivery services charge restaurants can stretch up to 30 percent and sometimes higher. The economics of those exorbitant fees were barely justifiable for a restaurant back when they had dine-in customers to offset the cost. In these coronavirus times, when people are being forced to shelter in  place, and millions are losing their jobs, handing over 30 percent of an order is untenable.

The proposed cap expands on existing legislation that was introduced in NYC in February of this year. Deliver services that violate this provision could be fined up to $10,000 per infraction — up from the $1,000 fine during non-emergency times, according to Eater.

New York isn’t the only city looking to reign in third-party delivery fees. Earlier this week Toronto Mayor John Tory said he was exploring similar measures in his city and actually calling up delivery services himself in an effort to fight commission fees. And last week, San Francisco Mayer London Breed issued an emergency order capping delivery commissions at 15 percent.

Talk of caps on delivery fees is a good example of shooting the wolf closest to the sled. High fees are an immediate problem for restaurants and customers when money is tight but everyone still needs to eat. But there is a deeper, systemic problem around the economics of third-party delivery in general. Famed restauranteur David Chang knows it, and it’s been a bit of a crusade for my colleague, Jenn Marston, who wrote recently:

Temporary caps in the wake of this unprecedented restaurant industry fallout are fine for now. But until we start addressing some of the fundamental flaws with the inherently greedy — not to mention unprofitable — third-party delivery model, the problems will proliferate, pandemic or no. Restaurants and their hourly workers will shoulder the bulk of those burdens.

According to the Post, the New York City Council will take up the proposed cap on fees at their virtual meeting on April 29.

Update: Chicago is now also considering a cap on third-party delivery commission fees. A bill to cap those fees at 5 percent is currently in front of the city council, who will vote on the matter. If passed, this would be the lowest commission fee cap yet.

States Call for Restaurant Shutdowns, Businesses Switch to Delivery Models

The list of cities and states now mandating that restaurants close their dining rooms and switch to delivery- and takeout-only models continues to grow as governments and businesses work to slow the spread of coronavirus across the U.S. These moves arrive just as the CDC advises against gatherings of 50 or more for the next eight weeks.

As of Monday morning, Ohio, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Washington state have ordered bars and restaurants to close or switch to off-premises formats. New York City and Hoboken, N.J. are also requiring restaurants to shutter dining rooms, and around the country individual businesses have been voluntarily closing their establishments for the last few days. Starbucks and Chick-fil-A have moved all stores to a to-go model, Momofuku shuttered all of its locations, and Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality group closed all its restaurants. Those are just a few names on a list that will in all likelihood include most restaurants in the U.S. in the near future.

How restaurants will manage this shift and what will happen to existing staff varies city by city, restaurant by restaurant, and in some cases by restaurants within the same brand. Starbucks, for example, is currently keeping the bulk of its locations open for delivery, mobile pickup, and drive thru orders, but will completely shut stores at malls and universities and in areas with “high clusters of COVID-19 cases,” according to a letter from the company.

Celebrity chef Jose Andrés, meanwhile, said he would be closing all of his restaurants but that some of them would be transformed to community kitchens staffed by volunteers giving takeout meals to those in need. Existing employees will get paid leave in the meantime. 

Other employees are not so fortunate. Seattle chef and restauranteur Tom Douglas has closed 12 of his 13 restaurants and laid off staff, saying that he will rehire them once business reopens.

And, of course, many businesses are switching to off-premises-only models and will be able to fulfill delivery orders and in some cases those placed at the drive-thru. On the one hand, that’s a plus for existing staff, who presumably in most cases will be able to keep their jobs. However, delivery, especially via third-party apps like Grubhub and Uber Eats, remains a challenge for many businesses, especially independent ones. Commission fees these services collect per transaction are often prohibitively high for small restaurants. And with recession looming (probably already here, actually), there are questions around whether consumers will even want to pay the delivery and service fees required to get restaurant meals sent straight to their homes.

Most of the major delivery companies have responded with initiatives aimed at smaller restaurants and customers at this time. Uber Eats just announced it will waive all delivery fees for orders at independent restaurants. And last week, both Grubhub and Postmates announced they will waive commission fees for independent restaurants for the time being.

However, not all restaurants are set up for delivery, and some worry that the closing now will permanently put them out of business. One owner told the L.A. Times that his shop is not set up for delivery and that, ““The numbers really don’t make sense; that’s why we haven’t done it in the past.”

Whether delivery companies negotiate more affordable rates with new restaurant customers during this time remains to be seen. Postmates, for example, said it would waive all commission fees for independent restaurants in San Francisco that sign up with the service. Others may follow.

We’ll be updating this post regularly, so check back for more news on restaurant closures as well as how businesses, delivery companies, and customers are managing this situation.

David Chang on Restaurant Delivery “It’s Going to Decimate the Business”

Famed restauranteur and Netflix’s Ugly Delicious host David Chang was on the Bill Simmons podcast this week. And while Chang was there to promote his new book, he and Simmons actually spent a lot of time discussing food delivery and its impact on the restaurant industry.

You should listen to the entire episode, but here are a few highlights.

Chang said that the biggest story in restaurants right now is the rise of delivery. “That’s going to be the story of the next ten years,” Chang said before adding, grimly, “It’s going to decimate the business.”

Basically, as Chang pointed out, because of delivery, restaurants now aren’t just competing with other neighborhood restaurants, they are competing with restaurant across an entire city. So restaurants now find themselves in even tougher environments when it comes to standing out from competitors.

Additionally, Chang suggests the math doesn’t really add up. If a restaurant is only eking out a 5–10 percent profit overall, what happens when they pay 30 percent commissions on deliveries through a third party like DoorDash, and customers are ordering 3 – 4 meals per week through delivery? Chang worried that this could turn restaurants into a form of indentured servitude, saying “The model has to improve for actual restaurants,” and “The 30 percent fee of delivery services is a model that’s not going to work long-term.”

Having said that, Chang also admitted that if DoorDash asked to be the exclusive delivery partner for his restaurant, he’d have to say yes “because they are driving so much traffic.”

Our own Jenn Marston has written quite a bit about this Faustian bargain that restaurants strike with third-party delivery services. And how that model is starting to change as restaurants begin to bring delivery in-house or create some kind of hybrid of in-house and third-party delivery.

Chang doesn’t think that eating at a restaurant will go away entirely, “They’re just going to be a specific kind of restaurant,” he said “They’re going to be the shit you can’t deliver, ultimately.”

In a fun aside, Chang actually ranked food that’s best for delivery. Pizza was the best followed by Chinese food and fried chicken. Host Bill Simmons lamented that “they have not been able to figure out fries.” Perhaps he should check out Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase winner Soggy Food Sucks.

Chang’s opinions, of course, come during a global pandemic, where people are being encouraged to practice active social distancing and avoid large gatherings. In Jersey City, the mayor has asked bars and restaurants in that town to take attendance in an effort to minimize the impact of the coronavirus. And in Seattle, restauranteur Tom Douglas said that he is temporarily closing 12 restaurants for up to three months after seeing a 90 percent drop in business since the outbreak.

You should listen to the whole Simmons podcast. Chang is a great interview who doesn’t pull any punches. And while “decimate” is kind of a pejorative term, Chang is right, delivery will cause fundamental changes to the restaurant biz. How it does so, remains to be seen.

Google Adds Hungr to its Roster of Third-party Delivery Partners

Google continues to connect your search for food with the ability to get it quickly, as the company has now integrated third-party restaurant ordering and delivery service Hungr to Google Search, Maps and Assistant.

Hungr announced the partnership today. With it, restaurants using Hungr’s ordering and fulfillment platform can now offer those services directly from a user’s Google search.

For Hungr, the move opens up a new sales channel for restaurants using its services by shortening the gap between a user’s search for food and their ability to order it.

For Google, Hungr is the latest third-party delivery service that it has baked into its search results. In May of this year, the company integrated DoorDash, Postmates, Delivery.com, Slice, and ChowNow into its Search, Maps and Assistant products.

Google is quietly becoming a sleeping giant in the world of restaurants and food delivery. In addition to adding delivery into search results, the company has also added features to surface popular dishes at restaurants, point out nearby restaurant discounts, and a virtual assistant that can make reservations for you. As we wrote earlier this year:

In the age of the attention economy, it’s not that hard to understand why Google busily adding more food related features to its roster. Everyone, everywhere eats. If it can make that eating more “frictionless,” to borrow a Silicon valley phrase, then you are more likely to stay in Google’s ecosystem. The more you use Google, the more data they collect from you to make more apps that, in the company’s mind, will make eating out, or order in, better (and make Google more money).

It looks like the Hungr/Google partnership isn’t quite live yet. In today’s announcement, Hungr said that it will happen “soon.”

Delivery.com Acquires Mr. Delivery to Expand Restaurant Delivery Services

NYC-based online platform delivery.com announced today that it has acquired Austin, TX-based Mr. Delivery. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This marks the sixth acquisition for delivery.com, whose platform connects customers to local retailers and restaurants to facilitate and the order and processing of goods and services. Sat in an NYC subway car at any point in the last five years? They’re frequently plastered with delivery.com ads listing all the different goods the platform can connect you with: restaurant food, groceries, booze, laundry services, etc.

Though its home is in the Big Apple, delivery.com is starting to expand across the rest of the country, with a current roster of cities that includes major metropolises Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., as well as a handful of mid-sized cities, most of them on the East Coast.

The acquisition of Mr. Delivery sees delivery.com expanding beyond those markets and upping its capabilities around restaurant food delivery. According to a press release, the acquisition will have Delivery.com expanding food delivery into Mr. Delivery’s current 160 cities, giving delivery.com a total presence in 38 states and over 1,800 U.S. cities, with more to come in the future. Meanwhile, Mr. Delivery will assume the delivery.com brand and technologies immediately. Delivery.com said in the press release it hopes to add other services, like grocery and laundry, to Mr. Delivery cities in the near future.

Restaurants who currently work with Mr. Delivery will get access to delivery.com’s order confirmation tools, business analytics, and partner integrations, among other things. In return, delivery.com gets access to last-mile delivery capabilities, as it will have use of Mr. Delivery’s network of drivers. This is the first time in its history delivery.com will actually be able to actually deliver the goods to customers; previously, the platform merely facilitated online orders and payments, leaving the last mile to the merchant.

But it’s a crowded market for both restaurant and grocery services. Between third-party delivery services’ push to mid-sized markets and companies like Walmart and Instacart bringing grocery delivery to every corner of the country, there’s increasingly less room for other players.

Delivery.com’s claim to fame has always been about serving the local business community and connecting customers to neighborhood stores and eateries. This, too, has always been Mr. Delivery’s credo when it comes to restaurant food delivery. Now we have to see if that focus on local is enough to help these companies stand out as they expand.

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.

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.