When Travis Kalanick showed up at the Food on Demand conference this past May, technology and restaurant industry insiders could hardly believe it.
After all, the Uber cofounder had gained an almost Howard Hughes-like reputation for secrecy over the past decade, saying nary a word publicly over the years while journalists and Internet sleuths searched for digital breadcrumbs about what exactly he was up to with CloudKitchens, a business under which he had quietly built the biggest network of dark kitchen/ghost kitchen facilities in the country.
But unlike the eccentric aerospace and film magnate who spent his days toggling between locking himself away in screening rooms and crashing planes, Kalanick made clear on stage in Las Vegas last month that he’s been busy building a new business empire focused on reimagining the world of restaurants and food delivery.
“Can you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car?” he asked. From there, Kalanick painted a vision of how the companies he’d assembled under his City Storage Systems holding company would do things differently. He suggested the sum total of his collected companies – such as shared/dark kitchens (CloudKitchens), Point of Sale software (Otter), and restaurant automation (Lab37) – could power a more efficient way of doing business than the disjointed, expensive, and fee-ridden state the restaurant and food delivery business had evolved into over the past decade.
It was during his talk that Kalanick talked up the idea of an ‘Intenet Food Court,’ where customers could get a hyper-personalized experience and order any type of food within 15 minutes. To realize that vision, Kalanick said food production and logistics would need to be automated, and his company was building the necessary infrastructure under City Storage Systems to deliver that.
“We paint where this all goes, but there’s a road to get there and we call it infrastructure for better food,” he continued. “That’s the mission of my company.”
Kalanick’s refererence to the concept of an Internet or digital food court was not the first signal from him or his company about the concept. In fact, in 2020, the company launched what it described as an Internet food court in the LA market, where it would aggregate all the food operators in the Koreatown facility and offer multi-tenant ordering. They even had a website URL, Internetfoodcourt.co. However, as of April 2020, the site had gone dead, and CloudKitchens had scrubbed its Internet presence of the term.
But then, in March of this year, the company started talking digital food courts again. That month, it posted a story on its blog about the launch of a Picnic-branded digital food court platform in Chicago. The location, which was formerly called Avondale Food Pickup before it was renamed Picnic, featured what the post described as a new digital platform that would enable a customer to order food on a new website (picnicfood.com) or in person via a kiosk or a human worker and then they would be able to pick up the food via a pick-up locker.
The pickup kiosk can be seen below:
The website for this Picnic shows you can ask for delivery or pickup, and currently the only location for pickup is the Chicago address in Avondale, and a Google search seems to indicate this was the first and only time Kalanick’s company had used the Picnic branding and the concept of a digital food hall since 2020.
And then earlier this week, what appears to be another version of the same Picnic company (same logo, different website) showed up on Linkedin and talked up a new platform concept in the Los Angeles market. The pitch? A ‘digital food hall’ and fee-free multi-brand delivery of food to different places of business or residential multi-family units. The concept, which is explained in the video below, is essentially bulk orders to various office buildings, schools, or wherever hungry people convene together each day.
According to the explainer video and the website, a Picnic “activation” starts with a location manager or employee/resident applying to be a Picnic delivery location. Once accepted, Picnic will put what it describes as a Picnic “shelf” at the location where the different individual meals are placed during a delivery.
This new Picnic doesn’t state anywhere on its website or on Linkedin that it’s a part of City Storage Systems’ network. The website‘s FAQ describes the company as a product of coworkers in the California market “who realized that it’s nearly impossible to find consistent lunch options that have variety,” and when The Spoon reached someone via a number found on the company’s Linkedin page, the person told us the company was not associated with CloudKitchens or City Storage Systems.
But we are confident it is for a couple of obvious reasons: Not only does it use the same logo as the CloudKitchens Picnic offering in Chicago, but the location’s address at 777 S Figueroa in Los Angeles is listed in multiple locations as being the same address as City Storage Systems.
Which, of course, raises all sorts of questions. For example, is this version of Picnic – a platform for bulk-ordered delivery of food to places of work and multi-family living – going to be the next big idea from Kalanick’s company? And does this mean the company is building out its own delivery network? And will Kalanick & Co roll out the digital food court and automated pick-up kiosks (such as that in Picnic Chicago) to its other ghost kitchen locations across the country?
A new delivery network would certainly be an interesting move for a founder who is largely responsible for not only reshaping personalized transportation with Uber and building the infrastructure for one of the biggest third party meal delivery companies in UberEats.
Finally, it also needs to be asked: Why Picnic? There are already a couple other Picnics in the food tech space, including Picnic in Seattle which makes pizza robots, and the grocery tech startup named Picnic out of The Netherlands. It seems like a curious move, especially since the US Trademark office awarded a trademark to the Seattle-based Picnic (their corporate name is Picnic Works) to use the term Picnic.
If you have any insights or leads on what else City Storage Systems is planning to do with its Picnic platform (either the centralized pickup Internet food hall concept or the bulk-delivery concept), drop us a line.
