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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Are Hourly Home Kitchen Rentals the Next Sharing Economy Opportunity?

Call it uberization, the sharing economy or collaborative consumption, the idea that people may have something others want and can rent or sell a portion of it frictionlessly through online marketplaces has changed the game for industries ranging from hospitality to transportation.

Food and cooking is no different. Uber Eats, virtual kitchens and the fast emergence of home cooking platforms in the wake of the passage of AB-626 has shown us food system business models are ripe for reinvention through the power of peer to peer.

But what about home kitchens? More specifically, what if we could simply rent a neighbor’s kitchen – built in appliances, blenders, countertops and everything else – by the hour?

While many of us have an oven, cookware and all the cooking gadgets needed to whip up a tasty meal, others are forced to eat out, have food delivered or impose on a friend either because they are kitchen-less or just don’t have the right set up to cook the big holiday meal or entertain in the way they would like.

What got me thinking this could happen is the recent news that by-the-minute hotel stay app Recharge has moved into the home market. If you’re not familiar with Recharge, they are known for offering access to hotel rooms on a by-the-minute basis so people can nap, shower or…whatever. It works with 50 hotels and now the company says they’ve signed up over one thousand homes for the platform.

With homes available by the hour, I have to think kitchens will be a central attraction for many. Whether it’s hosting a dinner party, baking cookies for the holidays or cooking a week’s worth of home meals for the family, there are all sorts of use cases where hourly access to a kitchen just makes sense.

In a way, hourly access to home kitchens is an extension of what we’re already seeing in the maker market, where concepts like that of Tinker Kitchen have emerged for people who want to get into a fully equipped kitchen to cook a souffle or try out a new cooking appliance.

“We are aimed at people who usually wouldn’t step into a commercial kitchen,” Tinker Kitchen creator Dan Mills told the Spoon last August.  “It’s food for personal enrichment,” he said.

Enrichment makes sense for the aspirational and hobbyist chefs among us, but there are probably lots others who just have an immediate need to make some food or host a party. A platform for renting a home with a nice kitchen would meet that kind of need quite nicely.

So will a sharing economy for the home kitchen take off? It’s too soon to say for sure, but my guess is yes. And the best part is? You can always book an extra hour to take a well-deserved nap on someone else’s bed when you’re done with that culinary masterpiece.

Delivery Is Making These Restaurants Literally Redesign the Way They Do Business

As the country’s appetite for food delivery grows and the market inches towards a projected $15.9 billion by 2020, restaurants are under pressure to adapt.

More and more, that means altering the physical restaurant space so it can better accommodate this influx of new orders. Extra meals require extra bodies to cook and package the food, after all, not to mention extra space for third-party devices, and somewhere to put completed orders waiting to be picked up by a delivery driver.

It’s wishful thinking to believe that a food delivery industry standard will emerge, since every business has its own unique space — and therefore, its own unique needs. Instead, restaurants are trying out different approaches; some on a large scale, some on a smaller one. A handful of promising ones have emerged when it comes to creatively solving the space issue.

For those with room to expand, creating a separate entrance and/or delivery area is one option.

Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen just opened a location in Ft. Worth, TX that includes “Cheddar’s first dedicated carry-out area.” It’s close to the kitchen but separate from the main dining room and has its own entrance with direct access to the parking lot. For a Grubhub or UberEats driver, this is a potentially huge timesaver, as picking up an order no longer involves weaving through crowds around the bar and flagging down an employee’s attention.

Velvet Taco conceptualized a separate entrance for to-go orders long before the delivery boom went off. The Dallas, TX-based chain offers its famed “backdoor chicken” order, where customers stroll up to the back door, hand over $20, and get a bag of goodies in return, rotisserie chicken and tortillas included. Adjusting for more delivery orders was just a matter of routing them along the same path. Third-party services (Velvet Taco works with several of the usual suspects) collect orders at the back door of the chain’s Austin, TX location. Meanwhile, a brand-new Dallas, TX location also includes a pickup window that can be accessed via a dedicated parking lot.

If a second door isn’t an option, there are still plenty of ways to work with space inside the restaurant’s four walls.

Culiver City, CA-based Tender Greens divides its customers into two lines: one for walk-ins, one for delivery and order-ahead takeout. That logic applies to the kitchen as well, where cooks are split into two separate lines so those prepping in-house orders aren’t bogged down by the number of tickets for delivery. At the chain’s El Segundo, CA location, even the furniture pulls double duty: a bartop functions by day as a counter for preparing to-go orders, then becomes communal seating for sit-down customers. Ditto for Tender Greens’ flagship NYC location at Union Square, which features 14-foot shelves, separate from the dining room, where third-party delivery services can grab their designated orders and go (a nearby area provides the same convenience for customers picking up food).

Some restaurants are scrapping dining room altogether. Enter the ghost kitchen, the cloud kitchen, or whatever you want to call it. These establishments operate with delivery-only models, where there’s no front of house and cooks serve up orders solely for delivery drivers to pick up.

The Green Summit Group gets a lot of press in this space for its commissary kitchens in NYC and Chicago, which work exclusively with Grubhub. These guys basically run multiple “restaurants” whose operations are housed in the same kitchen and whose food is cooked by the same chefs.

There’s an economical attraction to ghost kitchens, of course. Those using ghost kitchens don’t have to worry about buying equipment, hiring a new staff for every new location, or even providing simple things like cutlery and tablecloths. Businesses who can’t, or don’t want to, deal with these elements or lock themselves into a 10-year lease and buy their own equipment can also look to folks like Kitchen United, who operates a shared kitchen space available for hourly or monthly rent which can house up to 15 restaurant operations. “When a restaurant operator comes to a KU kitchen, they get a virtual restaurant solution,” Kitchen United CEO, Jim Collins told Chris Albrecht a few months ago.

So is the dining room dying? Absolutely not. Dining out as an experience will be with us until customers run out of money or the Food Network runs out of celebrity chefs to create. Anyway, delivery wasn’t designed to replace the Michelin star, or (probably) even the Olive Garden; it’s just an easier, faster way to get a basic dinner without having to go to much trouble. Restaurants are starting to realize its importance and adjust their spaces accordingly.

Food Tech News Roundup: Voice-Enabled Faucets, Food Incubators, and No More Meat

Happy weekend! We’re going to make this short and sweet, since there’s plenty of food tech news to read and (hopefully) a lot of sunshine to enjoy.

Without further ado, here are the stories in food and smart kitchen innovation that caught our eye this week.

New reach in food delivery
Food delivery creeps ever further and further into our lives. This week, delivery startup Postmates expanded to 100 new cities, adding 50 million potential new customers. They also deepened their partnership with DIY burrito chain Chipotle Mexican Grill, adding 300 new stores to their delivery route.

Postmates wasn’t the only food delivery startup with an announcement this week. Uber Eats teamed up with payment app Venmo to let people easily split the cost of rides and food orders. So if your friend eats half of your Pad Thai, you can make her pay you the $6 you deserve.

 

Target rolls out more Midwestern curbside pickup
Shoppers at over 200 Target stores throughout the Midwest can now take advantage of curbside pickup. This brings the total number of stores with the Drive Up feature to over 800, spread throughout 25 states — with more to be announced over the coming months. Which means Target is halfway to national curbside pickup retail domination and has no plans to slow down.

 

Photo: Budweiser.

Drizly brings the Happy Hour to your office
This week online liquor store Drizly partnered with Anheuser-Busch to debut something that every workplace needs: an Office Bud-e fridge. The fridges have smart sensors that sync up to WiFi to automatically re-order beer (Anheuser-Busch, of course) through Drizly when stock is running low. According to a press release shared with the Spoon, the fridge can hold up to 180 cold ones at a time, and is set to rendering “classic ‘beer runs’ obsolete.”

 

Delta touch faucet with Alexa

A sneak peek at the new Delta faucet
Our friend Stacey Higginbotham of Stacey on IoT gave a video review of the new voice-enabled Delta faucet this week. In the video, she asks Alexa to “please turn on her Delta faucet” to let the water go. But things get a lot more specific; she asks Alexa to dispense “one cup” of water, and also to fill a vase that she places in the sink. Both times, success! These may seem like small victories, but it’s an indication of voice assistants connecting even further into smart home gadgets.

We the first to scoop the faucet, which lets you turn on the water with your voice, last year. The product isn’t actually for sale yet, but when it is — we’re interested.

 

Photo: Pepsico.

PepsiCo unveils plans for new food incubator
PepsiCo has become the latest mega CPG company to launch its own food-centric incubator, following in the footsteps of General Mills, Campbell’s, and others. This week on an investor call they announced plans to launch a new food innovation center called “The Hive,” which is intended to refine and grow their niche brands, and seek out new startups for investment. This comes just a few months after PepsiCo partnered with The Hatchery Chicago, a non-profit food and beverage incubator, to help beef up their business.

 

Photo: WeWork.

Meat is off the WeWork menu
This week coworking space giant WeWork made some serious strides to cut their meat consumption. Its 6,000 employees were told that they could no longer get reimbursed for meals including meat, which includes poultry, red meat, and pork. WeWork co-founder also told staff that they were nixing meat options from the startup’s internal “Summer Camp” retreat. No mention was made of fish, so I guess pescetarianism is still kosher?

Food Tech News: Celebrity Meal Kits, Beer Delivery, and UberEats Drones

This was a pretty thrilling week for food-related innovation in big data and AI. We wrote about a patent that lets Facebook see inside your fridge and recommend personalized recipes. Google debuted its Duplex technology, which allows it to hold freakishly realistic-sounding phone conversations (listen to it make a restaurant reservation, it’s insane). Perhaps most importantly of all, we wrote about a man who cracked the code for perfect chocolate chip cookies.

And now it’s time for our weekly food tech news roundup. We’ve got stories featuring clean meat labeling, drones, beer delivery, and Chrissy Teigen — let’s dive in:

Photo: Wikipedia.

Uber tests food delivery drone
UberEats has launched a trial program in San Diego testing food delivery via drone, reported Bloomberg. The world’s largest food delivery program could now theoretically drop off your pad thai in as little as five minutes, according to UberEats CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Of course that’s presuming that the food you’re ordering is already made, but still — that’s quite a bit speedier than even the fastest average food delivery wait time (from, you guessed it, UberEats).

 

Photo: Blue Apron.

Blue Apron teams up with Chrissy Teigen
Just a week after meal kit service Blue Apron announced they were putting their wares on Costco shelves, they revealed more news: they’re collaborating with model/cookbook author/Instagram celebrity Chrissy Teigen on a six-week lineup of recipes and ingredient boxes. The series will start on June 4th and, despite their launch into retail, will only be available via online delivery.

 

Photo: Pizza Hut.

Pizza Hut expands beer delivery
Pizza Hut launched a test program in Phoenix in December to deliver beer and wine alongside their cheesy crust-stuffed pies. Now they’re rolling out that test program in over 100 locations in Arizona and California, with plans to continue expansion later this month. It’s also adding beer partners; the original test was with Anheuser-Busch, but the pizza chain has reportedly added MillerCoors as a partner in brews.

 


Congress might approve lab-grown meat regulation
Quartz reported that a proposed spending bill approved by a congressional subcommittee includes a provision that would give the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) the power to regulate how lab-grown meat is labeled and inspected. It’ll go next to the full, 46-member House Agriculture Committee, and, if passed, would have huge implications for a hotly-contested issue: the labeling of cultured meat.

Did we miss any interesting, thought-provoking food tech stories from the week? Tell us in the comments or tweet us @TheSpoonTech.

Uber Eats’ Move Adds to a Noisy, Competitive Delivery Market.

The food delivery business has suddenly shifted from being about consumer convenience to a battle of market competitors more focused on profits and flattening the value chain than providing options. An industry focused on giving hungry consumers the opportunity to select from a wide array of dinner-time choices has morphed into pizza delivery 2.0 and that’s, at best, boring. Simply said, the home chef faces a lot of cacophonies when it comes to grocery delivery, meal kits, and restaurant fare (home and away).

Profits are a good thing, especially for public companies or ones with an eye on expansion or acquisition. However, what we find in recent announcements is a change from the initial concept of turning a fleet of rideshare drivers into a virtual extension of a city’s best restaurants.  When Uber Eats acquires Ando, a “dark kitchen,” its fare likely will become the focus of its New York delivery options.  The king of all rideshare firms thus sends a signal to its customers that Ando’s bibimbap and fried chicken will be tonight’s special every night. The food delivery business is heading for a 180-turn, moving from delighted consumers (as we see in the GrubHub ads) to one of supplier vertical consolidation.

“We are committed to investing in technology that helps consumers, delivery and restaurant partners alike,” Jason Droege, Head of Uber Everything told TechCrunch. “Ando’s insights will help our restaurant technology team as we work with our restaurant partners to grow their business.”

None of this is to say that Uber Eats is wrong or alone in seeking ways to increase its bottom line. Others such as Deliveroo and Amazon are connecting pieces of the value chain—that is owning the food prep and delivery segments of the business—to streamline its operations. And, from a business 101 perspective, it is a sound idea if the founding principle of consumer choice remains intact.

Even with innovations, such as robotic delivery and ordering food based on your specific health DNA, this is an industry headed for a major reckoning. Why? Here are a few good reasons:

  1. The barrier to entry is low. Take Evansville 2 Go for example. A local man in Evansville, Ill., has built a food delivery service for his local community by hiring some drivers and connecting with a handful of local restaurants. There are many similar examples taking place around the country where entrepreneurs in markets too small for the “big guys” to tackle are building simple versions of GrubHub, Uber Eats, and Amazon Restaurant delivery. As pizza parlors as far back as the ‘60s (that’s the 1960s) knew, all it takes to deliver a fresh pie is a telephone and a trustworthy person with a car.
  2. Dark kitchens are a weak link in the restaurant delivery business. When a customer looks at his or her menu options for food, what is the more likely choice—an establishment at which they have had a memorable meal or one that may be run by a celebrity chef but lacks the cache of a local favorite?
  3. Competition for the consumer dollar. The average American dines out a bit more than four days a week. That leaves three days for restaurant delivery and home meal kits (of all varieties) to battle it out for the consumer dollar. Given dining out often costs more than these two alternatives, there’s not a lot left in an individual or family’s food budget after those four out-of-home meals.

For those who believe that millennials will drive the restaurants delivery business, here’s some interesting news from economists at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Millennials are losing their taste for restaurant dining.  Spending at restaurants went down more than seven percent since 2015.

“It stands out as a bit unusual how soft restaurant spending has been considering where we are in the business cycle,” Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at BofA Merrill Lynch told CNBC. “The consumer should be spending more on a broad range of items. But we’ve seen restaurants slowing more akin to a recessionary environment.”

Take heart—pizza delivery isn’t going anywhere.

UberEATS Creates “Virtual Restaurants” to Fill Culinary Voids

We’ve talked before about virtual reality coming to restaurants and possibly training robots to be chefs, but now there’s word that UberEATS is creating entire “virtual restaurants” that exist only inside their app, but serve very real food.

We came across this story via TechCrunch today, but Restaurant Hospitality wrote about it last month.

Here’s the concept in a nutshell. UberEATS sees what foods people in specific neighborhoods are searching for. If that food isn’t served in an area, Uber will approach an existing restaurant and see if they want to serve the missing cuisine. If that establishment agrees, Uber builds a virtual restaurant in its app that people can order from.

The example from Restaurant Hospitality is a Chicago pizza place that created a whole other chicken restaurant that exists only on UberEATS. It uses the same fryers it already had in the pizzeria kitchen, and now does $1,000 worth of chicken sales each week.

It’s easy to see how this could drastically change how a restaurant does business. With a virtual restaurant, they can easily test menu items or whole new cuisine concepts without having to build or invest in a real world presence.

That’s not to say that every virtual restaurant concept will work. An example Uber gave to TechCrunch is the ability for a restaurant to add a Mexican virtual offering. It seems a bit dismissive to think that just any restaurant could shift to Mexican food. It’s easy to see the reach of some greedy restaurants exceeding their grasp. Though, with UberEATS’ new five star rating system, the market will hopefully weed out poseurs quickly.

UberEATS is currently in 130 cities and works with 65,000 restaurants around the world. But now will it spawn 65 milllion virtual ones?

The Food Delivery Boom Comes At A Price

Food delivery startups have been all the rage, dominating food tech investment for the last several years. In what has become an extremely crowded market, there are signs that the market is shifting, with companies like Square reportedly looking to sell off its food delivery business Caviar and competitors like Postmates struggling to raise more funds.

But even with the consolidation, food delivery startups have added a level of convenience to ordering takeout that consumers are now used to. But at what cost?

The New Food Economy, a non-profit publication that publishes long form pieces on the forces that are changing food as we know it, published a piece looking at the dark side of food delivery and the challenges it presents to small restaurant owners.

The business models of companies like Seamless, UberEats, Yelp Eat24 and Postmates goes like this: hungry customer goes online to order food. Instead of going to a specific restaurant’s website and ordering through their system or picking up the phone (an antiquated notion these days), they visit a food delivery website that gives them menus, pricing, online ordering and delivery options for all the area eateries. The GrubHubs of the world then turn around and charge said eateries 10-30% of each order. The lowered margins aren’t desirable, but the idea is that the increased volume from the food delivery site will make up for it.

Except that’s not always the case. Working with these services requires the business to have a tablet on site that takes orders and it can get overwhelming to track different orders from different services. And then there’s the matter of profit – when Teddy Roland, a restaurant owner profiled in the New Food Economy piece, tried to raise his delivery prices, Postmates and DoorDash refused.

“How is that different from the Mafia in the 70s saying, ‘I’m going to take 200 bucks not to break your legs?’” he says. “‘We’re going to take 20 percent of your money and you have to live with 80 percent.’ – Roland

The longer piece is worth the read. It’s not surprising that consumer appetite for more convenience comes at a price. Lower-priced clothing is made by workers making unlivable wages in deplorable conditions, cheap meat is produced by giant factory farms and quick food delivery services take profits from take out joints who are often small businesses.

Some restaurants are fighting back and using tactics to encourage customers to take the extra step and keep their money in the restaurant. Says Roland, ““I’m asking a little more out of my customers,” he says. “You want to be lazy and just use your thumbprint and GrubHub app, you’re going to pay more for it, that’s all.”

Analysis: How UberEATS Continues To Compete in a Crowded Food Delivery Market

As the icon of the app-driven sharing economy, Uber never lets its followers forget that it sees itself as more than a ride-hailing service. The eight-year-old’s company’s aim is to become the logistics standard-bearer for the digital world and beyond. FedEx disrupted the package delivery business, and Uber has made clear that their mission is to follow that lead into the future digital world.

Depending on the source, Uber is valued at between $30 billion and $60 billion. Therefore, the San Francisco-based company is long on resources which drive its vision to explore all avenues in profitably moving things from point A to point B. The March 2014 move into restaurant delivery was easy and a low-risk one for the company building the new service as an adjunct to its existing infrastructure and brand.

UberEATS is now in 65 cities in North America, Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and Africa. While that total pales compared to acknowledged industry leader GrubHub, with more than 1,100 locals in its fold, UberEATS is coming on strong. UberEats poses a major threat because of the massive reach of its ride-hailing business, thus providing the company access to a huge total available market. In addition, major chains such as McDonald’s are more favorably inclined to work with Uber than its competitors because of its army of drivers.

In Southern Florida, McDonald’s is running a test with 164 area restaurants where customers can order Big Macs and other fast-food delights using the UberEats app. A $4.99 service charge is added to all orders. “We are most certainly very interested in the fast-growing delivery business not just in the U.S. but globally, so we are excited about the opportunity to provide even more convenience and more accessibility to our customers who have been asking for us to deliver, “Pam Williams, director of growth platforms for McDonald’s USA told the Miami Herald. Uber has more than 10,000 drivers in the Miami area alone that provide food delivery service.

UberEATS is positioned to take a bite out of the food delivery market. According to App Annie, a measurement site for app downloads, UberEats is the number one app for food and delivery. That ranking compares to competitors GrubHub at number seven and Postmates at number eight. However, UberEATS does not offer its restaurant’s partners an API to allow integration of its service with the eatery’s Point of Sale System. Most of its competitors, including GrubHub, Postmates, and DoorDash offer POS APIs which allow the restaurant to gather customer data and push directions and special instructions to drivers.

Even with all its digital ducks in a row, UberEATS might be little more than an experiment for the high-flying startup. In addition to its lack of an API for its partners—a vital element—there is little transparency on how it reimburses its drivers as well as the percentage it takes from the restaurants it serves. There is driver concern over the lack of guarantee hourly rate, as well as some major bumps in its logistics platform. Many drivers complain that deliveries that appear to be nearby can be much further than indicated, negatively impacting their daily delivery totals. And then there is the rule that UberEATS does not allow tipping. In summary, Uber offers little beyond its brand and dynamic driver network to differentiate itself in this space.

Much like other digital companies in growth mode, Uber has a number of new products and service trials in the pipeline– UberPool is a new service aimed at providing corporations carpooling services; working with Daimler; the company is experimenting with self-driving cars in San Francisco; and with partner Ehang, it is looking at drone taxis with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. Where does food delivery fit into this future scape?

Unlike its closed-loop ride-hailing business, the food delivery business includes the reputation and brand of its restaurant partners. Once a meal leaves to the establishment for a customer’s home, the eatery loses control of its brand. For that reason, many restaurateurs maintain their own delivery drivers which give them some control of their name and reputation. As it scales, quality control for its food delivery arm will be something UberEats must address. Uber cannot afford more negative headlines such as the $20 million settlement ordered by the FTC for misleading drivers about potential earnings.

Nearly three years after the launch of UberEATS, food delivery is still a high-risk, high-reward proposition for Uber. Tempting data about the eating habits of millennials point to opportunity in the food delivery business. In order to be successful, Uber must also contend with an overcrowded market, plus the entry of Amazon which has more money, a superior infrastructure, a larger footprint and more experience in home delivery. Perhaps the wisest decision for Uber is to buy one of its competitors and marshal its resources into getting people—rather than food—from one place to another.

McDonalds Trials With UberEATS in Florida as Mobile App Hits 11 Million Users

McDonalds is in the midst of a technology push that includes expanding Internet ordering and in-store kiosks, as well as exploring new consumer options such as curbside check-in and home delivery.

According to Marketing Week, the company just finished a trial in Florida with UberEATS, a partnership it announced in December. UberEATS would be accessed through the company’s mobile app, which already has 11 million registered users.

The company’s CEO, Steve Easterbrook, has previously admitted the company fallen behind its fast food peers, is playing catch up now by focusing on experiential differentiation using technology.

From Marketing Week:

“This is one where it’s better to be right than first to market. We are looking to understand what works best for customers. We are now focusing on the experiential side – curb side check in, order and pay, make it easier and more convenient and then build reward systems over time. We believe tech can do a lot of heavy lifting, so the overall experience will be better.” 

 

The Year in Food Delivery

Despite a distinct cooling off of investment in the food delivery space this year, some big names like Uber, Google, and David Chang threw their hats in the ring.

That’s because the online food delivery market is estimated around $210 billion, with companies like FreshDirect raising $189 million in the past 12 months. It’s become such a pervasive part of our way of life that Google even added a food-delivery shortcut to Maps. And there are plenty of food-delivery crowdfunding projects to go around.

But enough with the numbers. Here are the highlights in this space over the past 12 months.

More Big Players Joined the Party

This year everyone wanted a piece of the pie. Google started to ship fresh food to customers in California through Google Express. Instacart and the Food Network launched a meal-kit delivery service, and Square acquired startup Maine Line Delivery in Philadelphia to boost Caviar. Meanwhile Facebook and Foursquare made it easier to order food from within their apps through Delivery.com.

NYC darling chef David Chang decided to blow up the entire idea of a nice restaurant by launching Ando, a restaurant that only does deliveries, and he raised the bar on delivery food everywhere by launching Maple, his own delivery service that promises a daily delicious menu.

Plus, where would the year be without a few gimmicks? Taco Bell and Whole Foods both came up with ChatBots that help you order food or suggest recipes, respectively, solely through the power of emojis. And Domino’s will now let you order pizza with one tap on your Apple Watch.

The Year of UberEats

So far I haven’t mentioned the biggest player, though: Uber. The company has had quite the year in food delivery. It shut down Instant Delivery in New York City, then launched UberEats in both the U.S. and London. Next UberEats drivers staged protests over the way the pay structure has been changed, and in November a courier filed a lawsuit against the company for missing food delivery tips. Yikes.

All of this commotion from big names and turmoil within UberEats suggest that the food delivery space is still young enough that no one has solved some of the primary problems within it. Companies are grabbing on to any stronghold they see (emojis! self-driving trucks! drones! more drones!), without regard to the longevity of the solution. Uber has faced the brunt of this fast-paced growth, but we expect to see more struggles in the coming years for other players as well.

Eat Local

This year the quest to eat healthily expanded even more into food delivery. Whole Foods hinted at a “meal solution spectrum” with some sort of delivery component in the future. Good Eggs, which many thought was defunct by this point, rose from the ashes with a $15 million round of funding to help it deliver local, quality food.

And Amazon, never one to be shown up, expanded its Amazon Fresh program to Boston, among other major cities. The difference here is that Boston customers can shop from local markets, a feature that we imagine will be implemented elsewhere if it’s successful in Beantown.

You Say Potato, I Say Share Economy

In such a young and moneyed space, different business models are flying around faster than those drones I mentioned earlier.

Some want to deliver fresh ingredients to customers to help simplify cooking at home. Juicero, for example, delivers prepackaged ingredients for green juice, made in its blender that doesn’t even require cleaning. Similarly, Raised Real wants to deliver ingredients for homemade baby food, thereby making it that much easier to make your baby’s food from scratch (sounds ambitious to me).

Speaking of raising babies and tapping new markets, Drizly raised $15 million for its liquor delivery service, among other parts of its ecommerce model. And DoorDash added alcohol to its food delivery options in California (what about the rest of us?!).

Meanwhile Foodhini calls itself a “for profit social enterprise” and delivers ethnic food made by immigrant chefs: Foodhini and the chefs each receive $2.50 from each meal, after costs.

And BringMe wants to out-Uber Uber by combining delivery with the share economy in Fairfax, VA, enlisting regular folks to deliver food as “bringers.” There are already a few models out there like this, such as Favor in Texas and Tennessee, and we expect to see more too.

Of course, while all of these business models are innovative and interesting, none of them beat the ultimate and original delivery food: pizza.