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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

third-party delivery

Glovo Lands Real Estate Deal to Expand Its Ghost Convenience Stores

Barcelona, Spain-based food delivery service Glovo has inked a deal with Switzerland-based real estate firm Stoneweg. The latter will invest €100 million (~$121 million USD) to help Glovo expand its network of ghost convenience stores. 

As part of the deal, Glovo will occupy the Stoneweg real estate locations for an unspecified period of time. Stoneweg will build and refurbish these real estate locations in key Glovo markets to help the delivery service expand its reach with these delivery-only convenience stores. Right now include Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Romania, with other European countries planned for the future. Glovo intends to have 100 different locations by the end of 2021. It has just 18 right now.

Glovo launched convenience store delivery in 2019 as a way to stand out from other Europe-based competitors (e.g., Delivery Hero). The company’s promise is to deliver goods one might find at a convenience store in 30 minutes or less to customers’ doorsteps. To do that, the Glovo operates these dark convenience stores from which customers can only order online.

The company’s increased focus on quick convenience store delivery — what it calls “Q-Commerce” — is at least partly in response to the pandemic’s impact on how consumers get food items and household goods. Certain countries, such as Spain and Italy, have had far stricter lockdowns during the pandemic than many U.S. states. Those restrictions around leaving one’s house have in turn created an environment where it makes more sense to order groceries, snacks, and household goods for delivery, rather than venture out oneself. 

That said, Europe isn’t alone in this shift towards ghost convenience stores. Most Notably, DoorDash began operating its own version of the concept in the U.S. in 2020. In South Korea, customers can even get convenience store goods delivered by robots courtesy of LG. 

For its part, Glovo believes these dark stores are the future of retail, hence the company’s new deal with Stoneweg. According to Bloomberg, Glovo’s Q-commerce orders have grown 300 percent from one year ago, and the company plans to hire 500 people for the Q-commerce business by the end of the year. 

Deliveroo Raises $180M, Nabs $7B Valuation

Deliveroo announced this week it has raised over $180 million in Series H funding from existing investors. The round was led by Durable Capital Partners LP and Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC. With it, Deliveroo is now valued at over $7 billion, according to an official company statement. 

The new funds come ahead of Deliveroo’s initial public offering, which is expected to happen in the next few months.

The London, U.K.-based company said it would use the new funds to “further drive growth and enhancements to its services for restaurants, riders and consumers.” Examples of those areas include expanding Editions, Deliveroo’s delivery-only kitchen sites, expanding its grocery delivery service, and expanding its Plus subscription service. The company also said it would offer more restaurants its Signature service, which lets customers order via a restaurant’s own website.

It’s a shift from several months ago, when Deliveroo had to cut 15 percent of its staff in response to the pandemic. Also around that time, U.K. regulatory watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority approved Amazon’s highly scrutinized investment into Deliveroo, saying the delivery business could collapse without the funds. 

But, like other third-party delivery services around the world, Deliveroo has wound up faring very well so far throughout the pandemic. Will Shu, Deliveroo’s founder, told The Guardian in December that COVID-19 had “accelerated consumer adoption of food delivery services by about two or three years,” and that order volumes for the service in the U.K. and Ireland were double those of 2019. In the same interview, Shu also said his company had been profitable “at the operating level” for about six months.  

Currently, Deliveroo operates in 12 countries, including a number of Western European nations as well as Singapore, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates. Its main competitor, Just Eat Takeaway.com, operates in many of the same markets.

Delivery Hero Gets Approval for the $4B Woowa Bros. Deal, Will Sell Its South Korea Business

Delivery Hero will sell its South Korea-based food delivery app Yogiyo as part of the conditions for getting regulatory approval on its $4 billion deal to buy Woowa Bros., which owns the country’s largest food delivery service Baedal Minjok. Final written approval on the deal is expected to happen in the first quarter of 2021, according to an official announcement from Delivery Hero.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) flagged the deal in November over concerns about its impact on competition in South Korea’s fast-growing food delivery space. Were Delivery Hero to hang onto Yogiyo, the combined user bases of that app plus Baedal Minjok’s would have given Delivery Hero 97 percent of the marketshare in South Korea. KFTC approved the Woowa Bros. deal on the condition that Delivery Hero offload the entirety of its own South Korea business.

Delivery Hero cofounder and Chief Executive said in a statement that his company was “deeply saddened by the required condition to divest Delivery Hero’s subsidiary.” However, Delivery Hero will nonetheless sell off Yogiyo within six months, per KFTC’s terms. 

Even with the requirement to sell 100 percent of its stake in Yogiyo, Berlin-based Delivery Hero will access a massive user base with the purchase of Woowa Bros.: roughly 15.8 million monthly active users, or 82 percent of the marketshare in South Korea.  

The South Korean food delivery market, meanwhile, is the world’s third largest, behind China and the U.S. Coupang Eats, backed by Softbank-owned e-commerce company Coupang, is the country’s third largest player, and will be Delivery Hero’s chief rival going forward.

Delivery Hero has six months from the time it gets written confirmation of regulators’ decision to complete the sale of Yogiyo.

Ritual Teams Up With NYC to Provide Commission-Free Delivery to Restaurants

Online ordering system Ritual has teamed up with New York City to offer restaurants in the Big Apple access to its platform for delivery and pickup orders at no extra cost. The deal is part of the second phase of New York’s Empire State Digital Initiative, which is providing support for restaurants and foodservice industry businesses impacted by Covid. Restaurants can use the Ritual platform free of charge from now until April 2021, according to a statement from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. 

Ritual brought its online order platform to the U.S. earlier this year. The software plugs into a restaurant’s main system and enables the business to process delivery and takeout orders through its own website, rather than those of the major third-party delivery platforms. It’s another example in the recent wave of technologies dedicated to native and/or hybrid ordering, where restaurants get to manage orders through their own digital properties and need only rely on Grubhub, DoorDash, and others for things like the last mile of delivery.

Right now, with the pandemic numbers still rising and indoor dining once again banned in NYC, cutting away at least some of third-party delivery’s control over the restaurant industry is important for a couple of reasons. For one, it lets restaurants own their interactions, and therefore the data on those interactions, with customers. Most importantly, decreasing reliance on delivery apps also diminishes the commission fees restaurants must pay. As we discuss ad infinitum here at The Spoon, those fees are highly controversial because they can stretch as high as 30 percent per transaction, further decimating what little margins restaurants have left (if any). 

NYC imposed mandatory caps on these commission fees several months ago. However, the city also just shut indoor dining down once more in an effort to curb the spread of the pandemic. This time, the shutdown is indefinite, with some calling it a “death blow” to businesses, especially the independent ones. Once again, restaurants have to rely on delivery and takeout as their only channels for business. 

Ritual’s commission-free order platform may not be able to save every business, but it could quite possibly pull a few back from the brink by saving them a little money that would otherwise go towards lining the pockets of DoorDash et al.

For restaurants that join the platform through the Empire State Digital Initiative, Ritual will waive setup, subscription, and some credit-card processing fees. 

Jimmy John’s Deal With DoorDash Boosts the In-House Delivery Concept

In a major about-face, sandwich chain Jimmy John’s this week announced a nationwide partnership with DoorDash to use the latter’s new Self-Delivery service. 

Through that service, Jimmy John’s will use DoorDash’s marketplace to process orders and reach new customers while still maintaining its own driver fleet and control of the last mile of delivery. The nationwide expansion follows a six-month pilot of 100 restaurants. DoorDash has also built a direct integration with Jimmy John’s POS system, so that delivery and pickup orders go straight to the main system rather than to an external tablet.

At one point, Jimmy John’s was famous for its refusal to use third-party delivery services, flatly stating in 2019, “We will never use third party delivery services.”

Two big things have happened since that statement, though: Inspire Brands acquired Jimmy John’s and the COVID-19 pandemic hit, decimating the restaurant experience as we know it.

Inspire, which also owns Arby’s, Sonic, and Buffalo Wild Wings, completed its acquisition of Jimmy John’s in September of 2019. At the time, Jimmy John’s successful in-house delivery program was seen as an attractive asset few other brands could offer. (Domino’s is the other notable example here.)

Then along came COVID-19, and even quick-service brands — which have fared much better overall than other restaurant formats — were forced to shift the majority of their focus to improving the off-premises experience, including delivery. 

Inspire Brands has long had an existing relationship with DoorDash, so given the state of the restaurant biz, it’s not terribly surprising Jimmy John’s would eventually get linked to the third-party delivery service. Reaching new customers via digital channels is a must nowadays, and Inspire acknowledged as much this week in its press release: “As part of a broader brand evolution, Jimmy John’s has been focused on continuing to reach new guests and refining its channels and operations to meet customers where they are while maintaining the unique Jimmy John’s delivery experience.”

The twist, of course, is the Self-Delivery program. Through it, Jimmy John’s can gain access to more customers via digital channels while still keeping high commission fees down by using its own drivers. Keeping the fleet in-house also gives the brand more control over the quality of its orders as they travel from kitchen to customer.

Jimmy John’s is in a unique position in that it has kept an in-house delivery fleet for years and can afford to continue that, even as the fallout from the pandemic continues. Other brands can’t necessarily afford that luxury, so it isn’t certain this deal will motivate other chains to adopt similar delivery strategies. A more common route to hybrid delivery will likely be restaurants processing orders and payments through their own digital properties and letting a third party handle the last mile.   

DoorDash Launches Initial Public Offering

DoorDash announced today it has launched the roadshow for its initial public offering (IPO). The company is offering 33,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock, with the initial public offering price expected to be between $75 and $85 per share, according to a company press release.

The San Francisco-based food delivery service confidentially filed for an IPO in February of this year and unveiled the public S-1 filing in November. The S-1 filing revealed that the company reported a profit for the first time in its history during the second quarter of 2020 — which coincided with the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a noteworthy milestone in an industry that thrives on promising a profitability it hasn’t, for the most part, achieved yet.

For DoorDash, part of that trek towards profitability appears to be expanding its service to other areas of food delivery besides restaurants. In April, the company announced partnerships with major convenience stores, including Wawa and 7-Eleven, and in August, it launched a grocery delivery service. It even went as far as to open its own “ghost convenience store,” called DashMart, which is basically a virtual convenience store owned and operated by DoorDash.  

Those new sales channels may be necessary at a time when the restaurant industry faces new restrictions to help curb the spread of the pandemic. It is difficult to say at this point how many restaurants will shutter permanently when all is said and done, and delivery services may need to branch out further to keep on the road to profitability. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, DoorDash is aiming for a valuation of $25 billion to $38 billion. The company garnered $675 million in revenue and a profit of $23 million for Q2 2020. For Q3, it posted a net loss of $43 million for Q3, but still reported revenue growth of $879 million. The company has said in the past that COVID-19-related lockdowns have played a significant role in its growth. That could be the case for a long time yet.

HungryPanda Raises $70M to Provide Food Delivery to Overseas Chinese Customers

HungryPanda, a food delivery service catering to Chinese communities overseas, announced today that it has raised $70 million. The round was led by Kinnevik with participation from 83North, Felix Capital, Piton Capital, and Burda Principle Investment. 

The London, U.K.-based company will use the new funds to continue its global expansion, delivering authentic Chinese restaurant food and groceries to Chinese people living abroad. According to today’s press release, HungryPanda’s business is already profitable in the U.K. as well as other major cities, including NYC. The service is currently available in 47 cities across six countries. 

The HungryPanda app stands out in the food delivery space because of this specific focus on the millions of Chinese people living in other countries who might encounter cultural and language barriers when trying to order restaurant food or groceries via an app. CEO Eric Liu started the company in 2017 as a direct response to this issue, which he himself experienced firsthand. The goal was — and continues to be — to provide the Chinese diaspora with a food delivery service that can meet their needs not just for food but also for the experience of browsing a menu, choosing a meal, and paying for it.

To that end, the app and website that is entirely in Mandarin and connects people with authentic Chinese restaurants, grocers, and other food outlets. Business owners, too, can use the service to connect with a potentially more relevant base of customers than they might find on, say, DoorDash.

HungryPanda raised $20 million in February of this year. At the time, Liu said that the U.S. was “strategically important” and would be the company’s focus for 2020.

DoorDash to Pay $2.5M to Settle Lawsuit Over Former Tipping Policies

DoorDash will pay a $2.5 million settlement to the Washington, D.C. attorney general’s office over a lawsuit filed in 2019 about the delivery service’s controversial tipping policies. Attorney General Karl Racine announced yesterday that DoorDash has agreed to the settlement “to resolve allegations that it mislead D.C. consumers and used tips left for workers to boost the company’s bottom line.”

Racine filed the suit in November of 2019, not long after DoorDash changed its much-maligned tipping policy where it used workers’ tips to contribute to their base pay. The lawsuit alleged that “the only thing the consumer’s tip changed was DoorDash’s share of the worker’s pay.” Most of the buying public, meanwhile, had no idea their tip money was going towards, well, not tips. Racine sought to recover millions in that tip money.

Which he has. According to the press release from the attorney general’s office, DoorDash will pay $1.5 million in relief to delivery workers in D.C., $750,000 to the District, and donate $250,000 to District charities. DoorDash will also “be required to maintain a payment model that ensures all tips go to workers without lowering their base pay” and provide transparency around its payment policies.

“Today’s settlement rights a wrong that deceived D.C. consumers and deprived workers of monies that they should have been paid,” said AG Racine.

Color me cynical, but it doesn’t feel like as much of a victory as it might have even few months ago. It’s great workers are getting some of those tips back that were originally put towards their base pay. But $2.5 million ain’t a lot of dough when you consider that DoorDash (along with other gig economy companies) bankrolled Prop 22 for $200 million, the most expensive ballot measure in California’s history. It passed, meaning DoorDash drivers will remain independent contractors and the company is not on the hook to give its workers minimum wage, paid sick leave, and health care. 

In other words, the Prop 22 saga showed us that gig economy companies will pay hundreds of millions to effectively not take care of the folks on whose backs these businesses are built. DoorDash may have changed its tipping policy, but I doubt a $2.5 million settlement will motivate the company to further alter its approach to handling its workforce anytime soon. 

The settlement also comes just a couple weeks after DoorDash filed for its IPO. In that filing, DoorDash said that if it fails “to cost-effectively attract and retain Dashers,” the company’s business, operations, and financials could be “adversely affected.” Having an open lawsuit about a worker-treatment issue would have been counterproductive to that point, so the timing of the settlement isn’t likely coincidental. DoorDash said in its filing that it has over 1 million Dashers across all its markets. Attracting and retaining them is a key part of the company’s growth strategy — so long as it doesn’t chomp away at DoorDash’s profitability.

The Delivery Hero-Woowa Bros. Merger Faces Antitrust Hurdles

The proposed $4 billion merger between Berlin, Germany-based Delivery Hero and South Korea’s Woowa Brothers now faces regulatory hurdles around antitrust concerns, according to The Korea Herald. Some South Korean lawmakers have gone as far as to request the deal get scrapped on the grounds that it is anti-competitive.

In response, South Korea’s antitrust watchdog, the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC), said it would give permission for the deal on the condition that Delivery Hero offload its Yogiyo subsidiary. Yogiyo is South Korea’s second-largest food delivery service, after Woowa’s Baedal Minjok operation. The merger would give Delivery Hero an 87 percent stake in Woowa, and the combined user bases of the two would make up 98.7 percent of the entire restaurant food delivery market in South Korea. Needless to say, concerns abound about what this marketshare would do for competition in the fast-growing South Korean food delivery space.

The situation isn’t unique to Delivery Hero. Antitrust concerns plagued Amazon’s investment in Deliveroo for well over one year. One big reason that deal finally went through was the pandemic’s impact on the restaurant biz, which had a ripple effect on Deliveroo’s business. Similarly, Takeaway.com’s merger with Just Eat faced similar regulatory concerns, though it took far less time for that deal to go through than was the case with Amazon. Regulatory issues were one reason Uber Eats likely killed its ambitions to acquire Grubhub this past summer. The newly formed Just Eat Takeaway.com eventually won the Grubhub bidding war, and there is always a chance that deal could come under regulatory scrutiny before it goes through.

Delivery Hero made clear it will fight the KFTC’s conditions, with Reuters noting the service will “challenge” the recommendation and that Delivery Hero sees it as “a starting point for negotiations.” It will, however, slow the deal down in all likelihood.

Lyft vs. DoorDash

We knew a DoorDash IPO was on the way, and it arrived this past week packaged with news that the company turned a profit in Q2 and has enough cash stockpiled to float along for quite some time. Throw on top of that DoorDash’s recent win on Prop 22 and its popularity among U.S. consumers, and it seems as if the company and its controversial business model for restaurant delivery are are unstoppable.

Or are they? The other big news this week came from rideshare service Lyft. Cofounder and president John Zimmer said on the company’s earnings call this week that Lyft had spoken with restaurants about many issues plaguing third-party delivery, including the sky-high commission fees companies like DoorDash charge per transaction. 

“These businesses want to partner, someone to help them move their goods from point A to point B, but one that does not step in between them and their customers,” he said. In other words, restaurants need someone to deliver the actual food but not necessarily own the order and payment process or the customer relationships (and data). Lyft more or less said it’s aiming to create that delivery model.

Even just one year ago, making this model a successful play for restaurants on a widespread basis would have been a long shot. The technical logistics of delivery are complex. A sophisticated mobile order app a la Starbucks would cost a restaurant tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. Apps have to allow users to browse a menu and order meals, and they have to be secure around processing payments and storing customer data. With a few exceptions, using a third-party delivery platform for this piece of the delivery stack has historically been the easiest and most cost-effective path for restaurants.

In the early days of the pandemic, restaurants had to either accept this situation and use a third-party delivery platform’s entire stack or risk going under. (A lot of them went under anyway.) But over the last few months, a number of different options have surfaced that allow restaurants to power their own digital storefronts and only rely on delivery services for the last mile. ChowNow, Toast, Lunchbox, . . . the list gets longer each month. Each of these services offers the ability to power a branded storefront through which the restaurant maintains the direct relationship with the customer but doesn’t have to go out and build a mobile order app from the ground up. Most of these services also partner with the major delivery platforms, who still handle the last mile. Restaurants would still have to pay a small commission fee for the actual delivery, but it’s drastically lower than the 30 percent it can reach to when using the full stack.

Don’t Miss Our Ghost Kitchen Event!

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Lyft’s comments at its earnings call this week suggest the company is ready to capitalize on this trend. Imagine a restaurant using a system like ChowNow’s to power its mobile ordering and payments. The restaurant controls the branding, menus, prices, and customer relationship. Integration with Lyft’s software would mean once an order is placed, a Lyft driver would retrieve the food and drop it with the customer. Lyft is also well-established across the U.S. and claims to have more than 1 million available drivers, so its existing user base could make it additionally attractive to restaurants and their customers.

The question is whether this approach could differentiate Lyft enough to make much of a difference. After all, restaurants nowadays can approach a similar delivery model by processing orders through a company like ChowNow then letting an established delivery player like DoorDash handle the last mile. Lyft would have to offer ultra-competitive rates on commission fees and an extremely wide delivery radius to make itself stand out.

Zimmer said on this week’s call that it was still “early days” for this concept, though Lyft already has a partnership with Grubhub for a separate initiative. But between the pandemic, Prop 22, DoorDash’s insane growth numbers, and all sorts of other controversies, the need for a new delivery system gets more urgent for restaurants each week. This one might be a viable option. 

Driving Towards a New Kind of QSR

Meanwhile, over in QSR realm, big-name brands appear to be ditching the dining room en masse for the long term. If you had any lingering doubts about that, look to the last few month’s developments in the space:

  • Wendy’s struck a deal with Reef to kickstart its ghost kitchen strategy. The brand is also considering drive-thru-only store formats
  • Chipotle announced plans for a new store format that is essentially a ghost kitchen with a pickup area. This follows the brand’s efforts to double-down on its drive-thru strategy.
  • McDonald’s unveiled a new store design that consists of a kitchen facility surrounded by drive-thru lanes and a few parking spaces for curbside pickup.
  • Restaurant Brands International, which owns Burger King, Popeye’s, and Tim Horton’s, will modernize its drive-thrus to encourage more digital orders and off-premises meals.
  • Burger King also has a new store design that features a kitchen hanging over drive-thru lanes and a conveyor belt that delivers the food to customers.

The credo behind all of these developments is the same: make it faster, more efficient, and as free of human-to-human contact among strangers as possible. As companies look to speed up wait times and pandemic-proof themselves, we can expect the modernization of the drive-thru — and the death of the QSR dining room — to continue.

The Leading Food Tech Expo is Back on January 11th!

Food Tech Live is back for its third year! This year we’re going virtual and will have a full day of product showcases and programming. Get your free ticket here and, if you want to grab a virtual booth to show off what you’re building for 2021, let us know!

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced new restrictions for bars and restaurants that went into effect on Friday. All establishments licensed by the State Liquor Authority must close dining areas at 10 p.m. Only curbside pickup will be allowed after 10 p.m. Cuomo also said that if these measures don’t slow the spread of COVID-19, NY will consider reducing indoor dining capacity.

Third-party delivery service Caviar announced this week it has expanded to three new markets. The Grubhub-owned service is now available in Austin, Texas; San Diego, California; and Miami, Florida, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Dunkin’s line of holiday swag is back. This time it includes bedding, which may or may not be a sign that the world really is going to hell.

 

DoorDash Files for IPO, Could Start Trading in December

DoorDash unveiled its public S-1 filing this morning after confidentially filing to go public earlier this year. The San Francisco-based third-party delivery service is expected to begin trading on the NYSE in mid-December.

Reports of the service going public as soon as 2020 first surfaced in August, along with hints that the company was trekking towards actual profitability, which is still something of an elusive concept in the world of third-party delivery. Today’s unveil of DoorDash’s S-1 filing shows that the company reported a profit for the first time in its history during the second quarter of 2020. The company garnered $675 million in revenue and a profit of $23 million for Q2 2020. The company posted a net loss of $43 million for Q3, but still reported revenue growth of $879 million and has ample cash to fund itself — $1.6 billion, to be exact, though DoorDash has said COVID-related lockdowns played a significant role in its growth and that growth rates in revenue could decline in future.

DoorDash’s forthcoming IPO arrives at a time when demand for food delivery apps is thriving. Data from September shows that sales for these services grew 125 percent year-over-year during that month. DoorDash earned almost half, or 49 percent, of those sales — a significantly higher number than the 22 percent of Uber Eats or the 20 percent of Grubhub.

Restaurant delivery remains the biggest slice of DoorDash’s business, but it’s no longer the only one. Perhaps because of the uncertainty of the current restaurant industry, the company branched out into grocery and convenience store delivery this year, too. It even went as far as opening its own “ghost convenience store” facility in August.

Though all this cash and profitability comes at a cost of its own, a human cost in this case. DoorDash helped bankroll Prop 22, which California voters just passed and which allows third-party delivery services to continue classifying their workers as independent contractors. In other words, they’re saving a lot of money by not shelling out for benefits like workers comp, health care, and paid sick leave. The company also remains steeped in controversy around the high commission fees it extracts from restaurants at a time when businesses are shuttering in record numbers because of the pandemic. 

Unfortunately, money usually talks louder than any other issue on the table. DoorDash’s filing today shows that despite these controversies, the company’s growth is unlikely to slow any time soon. 

Could Restaurants Hitch a Lower Cost Delivery Ride with Lyft?

If you ever want to get my colleague, Jenn Marston fired up, just bring up the topic of third-party delivery commissions. Sure, Uber Eats, DoorDash and GrubHub may make delivery easier for a restaurant, but they do so at a high price, charging as much as a 30-percent-per-transaction commission on orders. For an industry like the restaurant biz, which is built on razor-thin margins, that’s just not tenable.

So we took note when Lyft said this week that it might get more into the meal delivery game, but do so at a much lower cost to the restaurants. As Restaurant Dive reports, Lyft could do this by eliminating the consumer facing app and acting solely as a delivery mechanism.

In this scenario, a customer would not go through the Lyft app to find a restaurant and order from it. Instead, the order would be placed directly through the restaurant’s website or app, and Lyft would just provide the drivers (of which it has more than 1 million).

Hybrid delivery strategies like this, where the restaurant owns the ordering and customer relationship and a third-party does the driving, aren’t new. DoorDash launched a couple of high-profile hybrid delivery partnerships with Little Caesar’s and Outback Steakhouse, for example.

A high-profile company like Lyft jumping into delivery could help push hybrid strategies more into the mainstream. And since Lyft wouldn’t be charging high commissions begin with, they could avoid revenue hits from delivery fee caps that have been put in place in various cities around the U.S. during this pandemic.

Obviously all of this is just talk from Lyft right now. If the company is moving at all in this direction, it’s still in the early stages. But just as with Uber, Lyft’s main ridesharing business has been decimated by the pandemic, so there is an urgency for the company to open up new lines of revenue. Uber piloted a commission-free delivery program earlier this year, but the orders still flowed through the Uber app.

The advantage for a restaurant using a hybrid strategy like the one Lyft is suggesting, is that the restaurant gets to keep more money and all of that customer data. But the downside is that it has to have the means to create its own online ordering presence. That’s made easier thanks to services like Chowly and Toast, but then restaurants still need to market its online presence and get people to not use a marketplace app like Uber and DoorDash.

There are still a lot of details to be figured out about any restaurant program Lyft might put into place, but if it saves restaurants money, well, that’ll be enough to get Jenn fired up.