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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

restaurant delivery

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.

Revenue, Customer Counts and Cloud Kitchens: Some Uber Eats Takeaways from Uber’s IPO Prospectus

Uber unveiled its S-1 financials document as part of its impending IPO today. While most of the headline-grabbing numbers were around the company’s potential $100 billion valuation and the $1.8 billion in losses in 2018, we at The Spoon are more interested in what the document says about Uber Eats . So we pulled some tasty nuggets from the prospectus about the food delivery service for you (questions are ours, italics are direct quotes):

Number of people using the Uber Eats
Of the 91 million [Monthly Active Platform Consumers] on our platform, over 15 million received a meal using Uber Eats in the quarter ended December 31, 2018, tapping into our network of more than 220,000 restaurants in over 500 cities globally.

Where is Uber Eats available?
Uber plans to expand Uber Eats from 500 cities to the 700 cities where it currently offers personal mobility services.

How much revenue is Uber Eats generating?
Uber Eats grew to $2.6 billion in Gross Bookings for the quarter ended December 31, 2018, nearly three years following the launch of the Uber Eats app, which we believe makes our Uber Eats offering the largest meal delivery platform in the world outside of China.

Later on in the filing, Uber says that Uber Eats did $7.9 billion in gross booking for the year ending Dec. 31, 2018.

Average delivery time
For the quarter ended December 31, 2018, the average delivery time was approximately 30 minutes.

(Ed. note: time to fire up those delivery drones!)

The halo effect between ridesharing and food delivery
…Uber Eats attracts new consumers to our network – in the quarter ended December 31, 2018, 50% of first-time Uber Eats consumers were new to our platform. Additionally, in the quarter ended December 31, 2018, consumers who used both Personal Mobility and Uber Eats had 11.5 Trips per month on average, compared to 4.9 Trips per month on average for consumers who used a single offering in cities where both Personal Mobility and Uber Eats were offered.

Uber Eats expansion plans
We also plan to explore expanding into new food verticals, such as grocery, and different types of food providers, such as cloud kitchens, to our Uber Eats offering.

With its growth, Uber Eats’ successes are a major part of Uber’s IPO story. But the company faces stiff (and well funded) competition from the likes of GrubHub, DoorDash, Postmates and more (and that’s just in the U.S.). Now we have to wait and see how tasty the street thinks Uber Eats actually is.

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.

AutoX Eyes Expanded Restaurant Delivery for its Self-Driving Cars

AutoX, the startup that made a splash last year with its self-driving grocery delivery + mobile-commerce solution, expanded into the hot food delivery space, and is now working with 14 restaurants in the San Jose area.

When it launched its first pilot, AutoX caught our eye because the company wasn’t just making straight grocery deliveries. It also outfitted its self-driving cars with li’l mini-marts in the backseat of the vehicles, so people could make additional purchases on the spot.

AutoX quietly expanded into restaurant delivery about a month ago, and at the recent CES show in Las Vegas, its autonomous cars delivered food from Applebee’s to hungry press and attendees. According to Li, one of the reasons AutoX likes restaurant delivery is that it can easily make multiple deliveries, reducing the amount of time the car spends empty.

Autonomous car delivers burgers at CES

Another reason hot food is appealing is that when a driverless car arrives with your groceries, there is no driver to help you carry them in. Hauling heavy bags of groceries could be a problem for older people or those living many flights of stairs up. You don’t exactly have to lug a burger and fries.

That’s not to say AutoX is abandoning its grocery roots. Far from it. Li says that they will just adapt their platform accordingly. “We’re exploring how to better use our technology,” said Li, “Maybe we don’t deliver to apartment buildings for groceries, or we do some kind of reward for coming downstairs.”

Additionally, the company is bringing its self-driving technology to minivans, which would allow it to make multiple grocery deliveries along one route.

There is increased competition for AutoX, however, on all sides and in its own back yard. On the restaurant front, DoorDash recently started testing self-driving car deliveries in San Francisco. For groceries, Udelv uses autonomous delivery vans to deliver food from Farmstead. And elsewhere in the Bay Area, Robomart just announced a self-driving mobile commerce partnership with Stop & Shop.

AutoX, however, may wind up partnering with some of its competition down the road. Right now the AutoX app serves as the marketplace for users to place restaurant orders, but eventually, Li said, the company’s self-driving fleet could be a delivery option for customers on a different platform like Uber Eats or DoorDash.

AutoX is part of a larger automation trend disrupting and transforming the food industry. If you’re interested in how self-driving technology and other food robotics will shape the meal journey, be sure to attend out Articulate summit in San Francisco on April 16!.

DoorDash Now Delivers Food to All 50 U.S. States

DoorDash just announced services in three new states, and with that it reached a new milestone: becoming the first third-party delivery service officially operating in all 50 states. According to a press release sent out today, that makes DoorDash available to roughly 80 percent of Americans. As is pretty much customary at this point, DoorDash will offer a deal in honor of today’s news: for today, customers will only pay a 50-cent delivery fee for all orders over $10.

The milestone comes with the addition of DoorDash service to Montana (Billings, Bozeman, Missoula), Alaska (Anchorage), and South Dakota (Sioux Falls), and brings the total number of cities where DoorDash delivers to over 3,300. By comparison, Grubhub says it currently serves 1,700 U.S. cities (plus London). Uber Eats, meanwhile, serves only a few hundred in the U.S. but is expanding all over the map, including to the Middle East and Asia. However, number of cities doesn’t necessarily equal the most marketshare, and DoorDash is still third behind Grubhub and Uber Eats in terms of customers.

It should also be noted that expanding into these new cities (as well as a few in North Dakota and West Virginia) doesn’t mean DoorDash gets a break from the competition, be it Uber Eats and Grubhub or the slew of other services who’ve long operated in small- and mid-sized U.S. cities.

Back in December, we wrote that these places are a new battleground for third-party delivery, now that major metropolises like LA and NYC are (mostly) saturated. To that end, Bite Squad, who was acquired by Waitr in December, is already in Sioux Falls, as is a small company called Zip Dish. BringMeThat operates in Alaska, and CafeCourier is in Missoula, MT.

The U.S. is a big place, but it seems our appetites for delivery are even bigger. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see DoorDash or any of the other top three look to acquire some of these smaller companies at some point in the near future. Stay tuned: the winning battleground could wind up being where we least expect.

Keatz Combines Frozen Food with Satellite Kitchens for Restaurant Delivery

One of the reasons Amazon had to exit the U.K. restaurant delivery market after just two years was Deliveroo. By creating virtual kitchens for restaurants and locking those restaurants into exclusive agreements, Deliveroo was able to build a moat around its business so deep that even Amazon gave up going against them in the U.K. And if a mega-giant like Amazon can’t compete in restaurant delivery, what chance do smaller players have?

It’s a question Berlin-based Keatz may have at least one answer to. Keatz owns and operates a number of virtual, delivery-only restaurant chains in Europe. They don’t, however, build out full-scale kitchen operations at each of its locations. Instead, the company uses a central kitchen to pre-cook the food, which is then frozen and shipped to smaller Keatz “assembly kitchens” in the markets where it operates.

These assembly kitchens are smaller than 200 square meters (~2,100 sq. ft.), which makes them relatively inexpensive to set up and operate in various European cities. Each location then, can also be standardized with the same equipment, because they are all just reheating the food, so those is no need for specialized equipment in various markets.

This hub-and-spoke approach to meal creation also allows Keatz to easily swap new brand concepts in and out at each location. Let’s say Thai food is no longer making money in a particular market. They can close that virtual restaurant down, ship frozen Chinese Food to that location instead, use all the same re-heating equipment and voila! There’s a brand new virtual restaurant. Each location can hold up to 10 virtual restaurants.

Once an assembly kitchen is up and running, Keatz relies on in-app promotion in existing delivery services like Deliveroo, Delivery Hero or Uber Eats. Keatz currently doesn’t advertise their virtual restaurants in the real world, but Joaquín Mencía, CCO for Keatz, told me that is something they are exploring as they continue to expand.

Founded two years ago, Keatz now serves areas in Berlin, Frankfurt, Barcelona and Amsterdam. Mencía said the company is looking to open three more facilities in Europe before the end of the year. Keatz is looking to expand aggressively in 2019 and raised €7.4 million (~$8.38M USD) to fuel that growth.

Keatz’s advantage will be the control it has over its own supply chain, as it will have deep insight into the meals it’s selling and can create new concepts relatively quickly without having to go through the logistics of bringing on a third party restaurant as a partner (or building out a kitchen specific to that restaurant’s needs).

I obviously don’t live in Europe, but I wonder how a continent so steeped in culinary tradition will take to frozen restaurant foods. People ordering restaurant meals for delivery probably aren’t as concerned with tradition and won’t care if the food has been previously frozen, as long as it tastes good.

$3.5 Billion Invested in Food Delivery Startups This Year

Investors have a big appetite for food delivery companies this year. The Wall Street Journal reports on Pitchbook data revealing that $3.5 billion has been invested in food and grocery delivery startups so far in 2018.

If you follow The Spoon, then this news shouldn’t come as any real shock. We’ve been covering big money deals in this sector all year long. Here’s just a sampling:

And those are just pure play delivery services. We aren’t sure exactly how Pitchbook is defining a food delivery company, but there’s also been plenty of investment in services that boost delivery:

  • Ordermark, which provides software and hardware to streamline delivery orders to restaurants raised $3.1 million in March, followed by another $9.5 million in September.
  • Starship and Marble, two companies building delivery robots, raised $25 million and $10 million, respectively.
  • Though never confirmed, it was rumored that Softbank was looking to invest $750 million in data-driven pizza delivery startup Zume back in August.

These types of venture investments also don’t take into consideration the money existing delivery and grocery players are spending to bulk up. Uber Eats will cover 70 percent of the U.S. population by year’s end. Grubhub just bought Tapingo to capture the college food delivery market. Walmart is building out its own delivery service, Amazon has its in-home and in-trunk delivery service, and Kroger is experimenting with self-driving cars for delivery.

And all of the delivery-related investments and moves in this story are just for North America. That doesn’t even take into consideration Europe, where nearly half of the €6.5 billion (~$7.5 billion) invested in food tech since 2013 has gone to food delivery startups.

The WSJ article raises the issue of whether this frothy investment puts delivery in overhyped bubble territory. The paper likens all the excitement to that of the meal kit investment craze a few years back. Meal kits are still around, but they are moving into retail, and it’s probably best if you don’t look at Blue Apron’s stock price.

To be sure, valuations are sky-high for these companies: Uber Eats is valued at $20 billion, Instacart $7.6 billion, DoorDash $4 billion and Postmates at $1.2 billion. That’s a lotta billions.

But the counter-argument to the bubble talk is that there are a lot of hungry people in this country. Even more to the point, there are a lot of hungry busy/lazy people in this country who would love to have their lunch or dinner magically appear, ready-to-eat, multiple nights a week. As the CEO of Ordermark told me, “Convenience is not a trend.”

In other words, investors’ eyes may not be bigger than their stomachs in this case.