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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

third-party delivery

Newsletter: Back-to-School Delivery Apps and High-Tech Sushi Burritos

While my colleagues are across the Pacific this week at the SKS Japan show, I’ve been thinking about college. Specifically, how college and university campuses are a lucrative frontier for food delivery.

Unless you’re in an urban campus like NYU, where delivery, takeout, and street food options already abound, the average college campus has everything a food-delivery service could want in terms of customers: lots of bodies packed tightly together, pulling late hours in locations where food isn’t always a given (e.g., the library).

Third-party delivery services like DoorDash and Grubhub already provide a presence on campuses, along with a much-needed alternative to soggy spaghetti and stale Cheerios. But for bigger corporations who’ve long been a part of the university foodservice world, third-party delivery is a competitive threat to their very relevance on campus.

Not surprising, then, that some of these legacy foodservice companies are starting to respond with their own contributions to delivery. This week food services provider Aramark, who works with more than 400 universities in the U.S., announced it had acquired meal delivery company Good Uncle.

Via Good Uncle’s app, students can order chef-made meals and snacks that are typically cheaper than the average restaurant and don’t have delivery fees. While Good Uncle’s reach is relatively small right now, serving just eight campuses, its business model makes a lot of sense for an older company like Aramark trying to stay relevant to students in the food delivery era.

Exactly how Aramark will leverage this new acquisition remains to be seen, but it’s a smart move to get into the delivery space now. Grubhub has already been working its way onto campuses via its 2018 acquisition of Tapingo, and a growing number of delivery bots on campus brings both new ways to do food delivery for students and more competition for existing players. That includes Aramark rival Sodexo North America, who this year partnered with Starship Robotics to unleash fleets of wheeled bots onto college campuses.

An Eatsa-style Empire in Japan

But back to Japan.

My colleague Chris Albrecht got to experience not one but two awesome food-centric things this week: sushi burritos and high-tech restaurants.

Chris headed over to Beeat Sushi Burrito, a Tokyo restaurant that serves sushiritos and is powered by an end-to-end system that automates most of the order, pay, and pickup process for customers.

As Chris noted, though, UBO, the company behind the restaurant, is more focused on tech than food:

“Instead of selling sushiritos, UBO has developed the entire system from the software platform to the cameras installed in the cubbies that read the special QR codes that identify each order. UBO wants to license its tech stack to other restaurant chains, who can then integrate the automat style of eating into their own locations.”

It’s not unlike the Brighloom (nee Eatsa) system here in the U.S., which is an end-to-end restaurant tech stack that automates much of the customer’s restaurant experience and will do so even more now that it’s licensed some of Starbucks’ technology.

So while a sushirito empire isn’t the end goal for UBO, Beeat Sushi Burrito is another example of how the restaurant experience is getting automated and suggests we’ll see many more iterations of this in future, on either side of the Pacific. And, most likely, in colleges and universities, too.

Until next time,

Jenn

Postmates Scores Multi-Year Partnership With the Los Angeles Dodgers

Today, the Los Angeles Dodgers officially named Postmates its exclusive “on-demand delivery and pickup partner.” According to a press release, the deal is a multi-year partnership that will incorporate Postmates Live into concession stands at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

Postmates Live, also called Postmates Pickup, debuted earlier this year. The feature lets users at festivals and sporting events order and pay for food, drinks, and in some cases merchandise ahead of time, so they can skip long lines and simply pick their items up when ready. The service kicked off at 2019’s Coachella festival in April.

For the Dodger Stadium deal, fans in the Top Deck section of the park will be able to order concessions ahead of time for the rest of the 2019 season. As noted in the press release, the service will roll out to the entire stadium starting in 2020. The press release didn’t specify which concessions will be available and if the Postmates service applies to things like alcoholic beverages.

When stadium-goers place an order via the Postmates app, they’ll be given a pickup time and a text notification when their order is ready. Orders will be available for pickup at branded Postmates Pickup points. For the rest of the 2019 season, those will be located only the top deck; the entire stadium will include Pickup Points once the service rolls out in full next season.

Postmates filed for an IPO in February but hasn’t made any movement on that of late, instead focusing on expanding to new cities and striking more deals with restaurant chains.

The partnership with Dodger Stadium is interesting because it gives Postmates access to an audience it wouldn’t otherwise be able to realistically serve. Baseball games, music festivals, and other arena-like settings typically don’t allow outside food and beverage through their gates, making it impossible for third-party delivery companies to have a presence in those places. A partnership that essentially makes Postmates an official part of the stadium, at least while the deal lasts, is a way to get that presence.

For Dodger Stadium, leveraging a third-party service’s technology and logistics capabilities is a way to offer the kind of convenience and instant gratification more and more consumers expect these days in a setting historically known for its painfully long lines at concession stands.

Waitr’s Partnership With Olo Underscores the Delivery Service’s Mainstream Ambitions

It was only a matter of time before companies started addressing the problem of how to help restaurants process third-party delivery orders without throwing an extra device or three at them, a situation otherwise known as “tablet hell.”

Right on the heels of a similar deal with Uber Eats, restaurant-tech platform Olo has teamed up with delivery service Waitr to do just that. According to a press release sent today, the two companies have partnered to allow direct integration of all Waitr/Bite Squad orders into a restaurant partners’ POS systems through Olo’s Rails technology.

Rails transmits orders coming from third-party sales channels like delivery apps directly into a restaurant POS system. This is in stark contrast to how restaurants have typically taken orders from third-party delivery apps. Historically, a restaurant would have to designate someone on staff to manually input those orders from a tablet provided by the delivery service into the main POS system — the aforementioned tablet hell scenario. As I wrote in January, when Olo nabbed an $18 million investment, “Olo doesn’t compete with third-party delivery services; it more or less partners with them, so DoorDash or Grubhub orders placed via Olo go right into the regular queue of tickets, without an employee having to manually input them.”

By partnering with Olo, Waitr will be able to offer all of its restaurant partners this kind of streamlined processing for delivery orders, which saves restaurants time, money, and, very basically, physical space in the restaurants.

Interestingly, Olo’s tech platform is typically aimed at larger chains: it counts Denny’s, Five Guys, and Chipotle among its growing list of customers. Waitr has up to this point focused on serving smaller U.S. cities and emphasizing the local aspect of its business. But the company recently became the center of a lot of bad press when it announced adjustments to its terms and fee structure for restaurants, which take a higher commission from restaurants with smaller sales volumes. In most cases those would be smaller, independent restaurants. While the new terms sparked protests in some of Waitr’s markets, they went through on August 1. Waitr hasn’t directly stated its focus has shifted to prioritizing bigger brands and restaurant partners, but as the restaurant biz goes, it’s typically the smaller shops who will have a hard time managing the new fee structure and may not be able to continue using Waitr’s service.

The partnership with Olo seems to further affirm that direction. “This direct connection into our partners’ order stream is delivering on our commitment to be the most valued partner for restaurants,” Waitr CEO Chris Meaux said in the press release statement. Apparently only if you’re Denny’s or Five guys, though.

Grubhub and Shake Shack Team Up for Nationwide Delivery Deal

Grubhub announced this morning it has partnered with Shake Shack to become the burger chain’s nationwide delivery partner.

Shake Shack CEO Randy Garutti told CNBC that the company picked Grubhub for its nationwide program thanks to the NYC-based delivery service’s wide reach, as well as its technology: “We decided Grubhub was the best partner overall. With their national footprint and the way we are going to integrate on the tech side — we have a really good opportunity to give the best guest experience,” Garutti said.

Some of that technology includes direct integration of Grubhub into Shake Shack’s POS system, as well as more precise order timing and tracking via Grubhub’s Just In Time technology.

The deal with Grubhub follows comments Shake Shack made less than a year ago suggesting delivery didn’t really suit its brand, according to Bloomberg.

But times change fast in restaurant tech. Third-party food delivery apps will hit 44 million U.S. users by 2020, according to new forecasting, and QSRs are a key part of this growth. And last week’s news that DoorDash announced its acquisition of Caviar for a cool $410 million only underscores how big a business food delivery has become in the last several months alone.

Grubhub has received its own share of headlines recently — not all of them glowing. In June, the company was part of an oversight hearing in Manhattan that called into question third-party delivery services’ controversial fee structures for restaurants. Grubhub has also had numerous accusations lobbed its way since then over cybersquatting and unfairly charging restaurants for phone orders. The company has denied the accusations and recently put out a blog post addressing its “treatment of restaurant partners.”

The Grubhub partnership with Shake Shack will start in four locations total, in Manhattan, Chicago, New Jersey and Connecticut, with plans to expand to more locations over the next nine months.

The White Castle-Uber Eats Deal Highlights the QSR Battleground for Delivery

Today White Castle announced a new delivery partnership with Uber Eats. The majority of the White Castle menu is now available via the Uber Eats app in over 330 of the fast-food chains’ locations.

Of course, if you’re of a certain generation, the name White Castle almost always brings to mind a certain cult classic film, and the launch of the Uber Eats program coincides with the 15-year anniversary of “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.” To celebrate, White Castle is giving away up to 1 million of its Original sliders (sorry, Impossible fans) to customers who order via the Uber Eats app. If you’re so inclined, you can also order a Harold & Kumar meal via the app that offers “special 2004 pricing” — which basically means it’s a cheaper deal.

Of course, when the movie came out in 2004 it was a very different QSR landscape from the one we see today. Nowadays, no amount of gimmicky moves like the above will guarantee you customers if you don’t also have a robust delivery strategy in place. White Castle already delivers via Grubhub and DoorDash, which makes the deal with Uber Eats neither surprising nor earth-shattering.

However, it does highlight just how heated competition between third-party delivery services is bound to get in the QSR arena. In fast food or otherwise, consumers don’t demonstrate a particular loyalty to any one of these third-party delivery services. At the same time, the services themselves are making moves to try and capture more of that elusive customer loyalty, particularly via subscription services that offer — depending on what you order — better prices and some discounts. All of which suggests QSRs like White Castle, who work with multiple delivery partners, could become a mini-battleground of sorts as the novelty of digital ordering and delivery wears off and consumers align with whatever service will get the food to their door cheapest and fastest.

Uber, for its part, has been hard at work initiatives that actually go beyond faster cheaper food when it comes to building customer loyalty: the company offers a $25/month subscription to its overall service, which is an Amazon Prime-like membership that offers discounted rides and free bike usage in addition to deals on Uber Eats. It’s also offering Eats functionality from the main Uber app, subsidizing customers’ rides to restaurants, and drone-dropping haute burgers, all of which are in part geared towards keeping customers in the Uber ecosystem. (Ok, maybe not that last one but drones are still cool.)

While publicity gimmicks like Harold & Kumar-themed meals are amusing and even commonplace when restaurants announce delivery deals, realistically, customer loyalty is going to come from how well Uber or any other service can execute on the above while still keeping menu prices competitive.

Ordermark Raises $18M in Series B Funding

Los Angeles, CA-based restaurant tech startup Ordermark announced today it has raised $18 million in Series B funding, according to Venture Beat. The round was led by Foundry Group, with participation from TenOneTen Ventures, Vertical Venture Partners, Mucker Capital, Act One Ventures, and Nosara Capital. The Series B round brings Ordermark’s total funding to $30.6 million.

Funds from the new round will go towards further integrating Ordermark’s service with other restaurant technologies, such as POS systems, kitchen display systems, and, of course, last-mile delivery companies.

Ordermark makes a hardware-software package that integrates and standardizes orders from disparate third-party systems like Uber Eats and Grubhub into a single dashboard. In the age of food delivery, it’s a noteworthy offering because it rids restaurants of the burden of having to juggle incoming orders off multiple tablet devices from third-party delivery services then input those orders into the main system.

The above scenario is often referred to as “tablet hell,” and it’s one restaurants have less and less patience for as demand for delivery increases and more restaurant-tech companies come to market promising solutions. Chowly is another such company that uses a tech platform to streamline orders from third-party delivery services. In a slightly different approach, Olo actually partners with third-party delivery services to help streamline the order process for restaurants. And with delivery apps predicted to hit 44 million U.S. users by 2020, the space is only going to get more competitive.

Ordermark closed a $9.5 million Series A round in September of 2018. The company counts TGI Friday’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Subway among its restaurant brand clients.

OpenTable Launches Delivery Program With Uber Eats, Grubhub

Restaurant reservations platform OpenTable announced it has partnered with Caviar, Grubhub, and Uber Eats to give its users access to delivery options within the OpenTable app.

“Our goal is to make OpenTable the go-to app for all dining occasions. Adding delivery is an important next step.” Joseph Essas, OpenTable’s CTO, said in a statement.

Moving forward, delivery via the OpenTable app will be available at 8,000 restaurants in 90 metropolitan areas in the U.S. It applies only to those areas where OpenTable and delivery services via the aforementioned third parties overlap.

When users access the OpenTable app, they’ll see options under restaurants to order food for delivery instead of making a reservation at the actual restaurant. If the the restaurant only works with one of the services, say, Uber Eats, the user will be directed to that specific service to complete the transaction. If a restaurant works with multiple delivery services, users can take their pick.

Food delivery via third parties like Uber Eats and Grubhub is a game everyone wants in on these days. Even amid a swirl of controversies, these apps are still predicted to have 44 million users by 2020. It’s not surprising, then, that non-restaurant entities are now positioning themselves in the landscape, too.

And clearly OpenTable wants to be the one customers go through to access those dining choices, even if the app can’t yet keep users within its own ecosystem for the entire order-pay-track process. And that last point will change as OpenTable said in a blog post that features for estimated delivery time and cost are slated for the future.

Along with the delivery program, OpenTable also launched a newly redesigned app that promises more personalized meal recommendations based on favorites, past bookings, and other factors.

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.

Deliveroo Launches Procurement Platform to Supply Restaurants With Discount Ingredients

Deliveroo this week launched Food Procurement, a platform on which the third-party delivery service’s partner restaurants can purchase ingredients and supplies at discounted prices. It’s part of what appears to be the company’s aim to become a one-stop-shop for restaurants, where Deliveroo would provide not just drivers to shuttle food orders to customers, but also vital pieces of restaurants’ infrastructure, from internet to real estate to equipment.

With the Food Procurement platform, Deliveroo buys ingredients on behalf of the restaurants, leveraging its scale and purchasing power to negotiate better deals with suppliers. Deliveroo then negotiates its own contracts with the restaurants, who get a better rate on ingredients and items like cleaning supplies and packaging products.

As Ajay Lakhwani, VP of new business at Deliveroo, said in a statement, “By using our size and scale to negotiate great prices we can both simplify the procurement process and help independents and chains can make big savings.” Deliveroo has been piloting the platform for the last year and says it can save restaurants up to 20 percent of their total ingredients bill.

While partner restaurants are not obligated to sign up for the Food Procurement platform, several hundred already have.

Amid Brexit concerns, food prices in the UK are soaring currently, which makes Deliveroo’s platform an attractive prospect, especially for mom-and-pop restaurants with tighter margins who don’t have the purchasing power to sway suppliers into cheaper ingredient prices.

The platform also underscores Deliveroo’s aforementioned aim to be more than just a delivery partner to restaurants. The company has struck numerous partnerships with third parties to offer discounts to restaurants on everything from print services and energy costs to wifi and waste management.

While those perks will inevitably save restaurants on costs, they also shift more power into the hands of Deliveroo. Such a shift definitely has its ups and downs for both sides. It’s also probably something we’ll see more of in future. As I wrote in March, when rumors of Uber-operated ghost kitchens surfaced, “it’s not hard to imagine a third-party delivery service taking over more of the operations up and down the operational stack.”

The launch of Deliveroo’s procurement platform comes right on the heels of news that that the service’s recent investment from Amazon is now being scrutinized by the UK government’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The Food Procurement platform doesn’t appear to be affected by this scrutiny at the moment.

Domino’s Responds to Third-Party Delivery Pressure, Hints at New Technologies

Domino’s posted its lowest-ever increase in same-store sales on its Q2 earnings call yesterday, a drop that’s in-part fueled by what CEO Rich Allison called “headwinds related to aggressive activity from third-party delivery aggregators.”

On the call, Allison noted that he didn’t expect to see third-party delivery activity slow any time soon, but that he questioned the sustainability of the third-party delivery model, noting that “there are going to be some survivors in this business and some of these aggregators will not be around in the future would be my hypothesis.”

A veteran of delivery, Domino’s has not and may never partner with a third-party service like Grubhub or DoorDash when it comes to getting pizza into the hands of customers as fast as possible. Rather, the company has over the last few years doubled down on its own in-house efforts, from its chatbots named DOM that can take your order to AI tools that assess pizza quality to a partnership with Nuro this year to test delivery via driverless cars.

On the call, Allison also hinted at what’s to come in terms of more and new technology initiatives from the company. Domino’s will launch GPS tracking technology at the end of 2019 that will, “bring even further transparency to the experience of tracking an order.” He also noted that the Nuro partnership will officially kick off this fall, and hinted at getting DOM into more stores across the U.S.

Despite their different context and mediums, all of these technology efforts roll up into the same goal: get the pizza delivered to the customer as fast as possible. And we’ll continue to see Domino’s attempt that through constant technology innovation, even as third-party delivery services continue expanding across the U.S.

Despite lower sales for the quarter, Allison said he was “pleased” with overall performance, and Domino’s is on track to meet the lower end of its five-year outlook.

Protests Over Waitr’s Fee Structure Highlight How Flawed Third-Party Food Delivery Is — For Everyone

Restaurants and customers in Baton Rouge, LA are currently holding a weeklong boycott of restaurant delivery platform Waitr. The protests are in response to the company’s recent adjustments to its terms and fee structure deal it has with participating restaurants.

Lake Charles, LA-based Waitr runs a third-party food delivery service similar to those of Uber Eats or DoorDash. The biggest difference in their business models thus far has been around expansion: since its inception in 2015, Waitr has focused on serving smaller U.S. cities, rather than the country’s huge metropolises. The company went public in 2018, the same year it acquired Bite Squad, another delivery service targeting mid-sized markets.

These protests, which started this past Sunday, take a shot at Waitr’s new “performance-based rate structure” for restaurants, which it unveiled a little over a week ago. With this new structure, Waitr takes a higher commission from restaurants with a smaller volume of sales, and a lower one for those restaurants with larger volumes. According to The Advocate, Louisiana’s oldest newspaper, restaurants with monthly food sales above $20,000 will be charged 15 percent per-transaction commission. The commission caps at 25 percent for restaurants with food sales below $1,000, according to a new Master Services Agreement sent to restaurants working with Waitr.

The new terms are set to take effect on August 1. Any restaurant that doesn’t sign the new agreement will be removed from the Waitr platform by July 31, according to The Advocate.

But Waitr could lose restaurant customers over these new terms, and many have already voiced concerns and frustrations over the kind of financial impacts this performance-based structure will have on already thin margins.

“We’re very concerned about Waitr changing their fee structure,” Mitch Rotolo, founder of Rotolo’s Pizzeria in Baton Rouge, told The Advocate. “If their model requires more revenue, they need to ask the customer to pay more for the service, instead of going back to the vendor and squeezing them. That’s unfair.”

Baton Rouge restaurant owner Jim Uridales, who owns Mestizo, told Louisiana news channel WAFB9 that, “Most people would be surprised that most restaurants live in a five to two percent margin on food, so taking that margin away would mean that every transaction would be a loss for us.”

The other side of the picture, of course, is that Waitr is now a public company under pressure to become profitable, which suggests this new fee structure is an effort to prioritize restaurants with higher profiles, inevitably weeding out the smaller businesses in the process. As Rotolo said, it’s unfair. However, it’s also probably one of the only cards Waitr has to play at the moment to boost its margins, even as larger third-party delivery services, most notably DoorDash, continue aggressive expansions into what some days seems like every nook and cranny in the country. And Waitr doesn’t have the $2 billion DoorDash has rasied to help its cause.

According to WAFB9, Waitr released the following statement:

To stand out in the competitive food delivery landscape, Waitr has adopted a performance based rate model where the more our restaurant partners deliver, the lower their rate will be. Our partners will discover this is a far more attractive option than those offered by our competitors. Waitr constantly strives to be the most valuable partner to our restaurants and this structure is reflective of the quality and service we provide.

Back in March of this year, Waitr’s CEO, Chris Meaux, told me, “We believe in the next five to seven years or so, we have a chance to be a significant leader in the space.” He also seemed very optimistic about his company’s approach to growth, which he likened to Walmart’s in the 1960s, when the now-giant retailer slowly expanded from its home state of Arkansas and took decades to even reach the coastal metropolises.

That style of growth seems slow for a public company considering growth is what the market wants to see. But is it also too slow for the tech-driven delivery era, where companies must move as fast as possible to offer as much choice as possible to a user base that isn’t loyal to any one platform? And are smaller restaurants taking the hit for what could ultimately have just been an unfortunately short-sighted business decision by Waitr?

The bigger question, though, is how Waitr’s situation will contribute to the debate around third-party delivery services’ power, which grows louder each week. Grubhub and Uber Eats both partook of a recent oversight hearing in NYC that addressed commission fees for restaurants (which are every bit as high as Waitr’s, by the way), and Grubhub has also come under deep scrutiny for potential cybersquatting and antitrust issues.

One idea, as Rotolo noted, would be to push the burden of cost back onto consumers by raising delivery and/or service fees, though that would spark just as much if not more outcry, most likely.

Waitr laid off 20 employees at the end of June in an effort to get rid of redundancies from the Bite Squad acquisition. This week’s protests, however they end, won’t help the company’s reputation, which it can’t afford to lose as other third-party players continue their march into the mid-sized markets.

McDonald’s Adds DoorDash as Delivery Partner, Ends Uber Eats Exclusivity Deal

In what’s a bad news Uber Eats but a major win for DoorDash, McDonald’s announced today it has partnered with the latter to expand delivery in the U.S. This officially puts an end to McDonald’s exclusive partnership with Uber Eats, which the quick-service mega-chain had in place since 2017.

According to a press release, McDonald’s and DoorDash will launch the partnership with a pilot at more than 200 locations in the Houston, TX area. That’s slated to kick off on July 29. For those using DashPass, DoorDash’s monthly subscription service, McDonald’s will waive the delivery fee for orders of $12 or more.

It’s a surprising twist, said no one ever. The Uber Eats-McDonald’s exclusive deal technically ended in April of this year, just before Uber IPO’d. While that deal made delivery possible at about 64 percent of McDonald’s locations in the U.S., it seemed like only a matter of time before McDonald’s pulled the plug on the exclusivity factor in order to widen its ability to deliver to new markets. (The exclusive partnership was also a point of friction with some of the chain’s franchise operators.)

As a partner, DoorDash is a no-brainer, since the delivery service operates in all 50 U.S. states and, as I seem to be writing ad infinitum these days, is aggressively going after every suburban market in America.

Chris Kempczinski, President of McDonald’s USA, indicated as much in a statement in the press announcement: “Building on the success of McDelivery in the US, we’re excited to make McDelivery accessible to customers on DoorDash, which is available in all 50 states and reaches 80% of Americans, making it even more convenient for our customers to enjoy their favorite McDonald’s menu items on their terms.”

On the restaurant-tech front, two parties have integrated their systems so that DoorDash orders go directly to the McDonald’s POS system, speeding up the order process and (hopefully) making life easier for franchisees and employees working with the platform.

One area the press release didn’t mention but that’s worth keeping an eye on when it comes to McDonald’s news: artificial intelligence. McDonald’s acquired Dynamic Yield earlier this year, and has since implemented its AI tech in drive thrus, with plans to expand that program to kiosks. And not long ago, word got out that McDonald’s has actually been testing deep-frying robots to automated beverage equipment. It’s probably only a matter of time before AI makes its way to delivery, and something like a McDonald’s-DoorDash-Dynamic Yield delivery platform that can improve recommendations and personalize menus for customers doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.