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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Delivery Platform DoorDash Hires Marble’s Robot Drivers For Food Delivery

If you live in San Francisco and order from DoorDash, you might find a friendly Marble robot on your front door step the next time you get takeout. Today DoorDash announced it would be using autonomous ground-delivery robots made by Marble, a robotics startup, for a food delivery pilot program in select San Francisco neighborhoods.

Marble was founded in 2015 by robotics enthusiasts Matt Delaney, Jason Calaiaro, Kevin Peterson while they attended Carnegie Mellon and describes themselves as a “scrappy robotics startup” working to build autonomous urban delivery robots. Scrappy as they might be, DoorDash is the second delivery pilot they’ve announced this year, partnering in April with Yelp’s Eat24.

The companies report that the pilot will allow them to “explore how to best optimize last-mile deliveries” and the first restaurant to take part in the robot delivery program fast food chain Jack in the Box. They made a quick video to show off Marble robots toting its first DoorDash deliveries in the North Beach neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Jack in the Box | Robot Delivery

The revenue model for robotics companies to partner with retail or food delivery services hasn’t been fully divulged; a spokesperson did say that Marble is being compensated for the work done in the pilot but declined to elaborate. However, delivery fees for a robot driver versus a human are the same for DoorDash customers. Marble said it didn’t have any hard data about how robot drivers create cost savings for delivery companies but that it hoped to share that information down the road.

Food delivery is an increasingly crowded space; aside from traditional restaurant delivery, “new delivery models” – companies like DoorDash, GrubHub and Eat24 – is expected to be a $20 billion market by 2025 according to a McKinsey report. In order to create efficiencies and differentiate, companies are looking to innovations like robot delivery drivers to stay ahead. And Marble isn’t the only game in sidewalk robotic delivery – former founders of Skype launched autonomous robotics startup Starship and received a $17 milllion investment earlier this year from carmarker Daimler Benz.

Starship had also announced a pilot in Redwood City, CA with DoorDash earlier this year. When asked if this program was designed to replace the competitive pilot, DoorDash responded that it was “…continuing the existing pilot with Starship in Redwood City, Washington DC, San Carlos and Sunnyvale. The Marble partnership adds to that relationship, allowing DoorDash to bring robot deliveries to San Francisco while also testing a new type of form factor and technology.”

Meanwhile, if you happen to see a Marble delivery robot on the sidewalk, you’ll probably see a human chaperone with it to answer questions and assist with interactions. At times when there isn’t a person nearby, Marble says they have remote operators ready to assist with issues and so far, they haven’t encountered any problems in the neighborhoods they’re serving.

The Sidewalk’s Getting Crowded As Marble & Yelp Launch Starship Robot Delivery Competitor

While Amazon’s trying to figure out how to deliver Prime packages using drones, other startups are making land grabs for the sidewalk delivery market. We wrote last year about Starship, the robot delivery vehicle made from the brains of Skype co-founders, Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis. Starship was the first to start actively piloting robot delivery drivers around the streets of London; the robots were equipped with sophisticated onboard software that allowed them to autonomously navigate city streets to deliver goods door-to-door.

Now Starship has some competition in the form of a new partnership from Yelp’s food delivery service Eat24 and Marble, a startup that’s creating a “fleet of intelligent courier robots” made for urban delivery usage. Yelp Eat24 and Marble are together bringing robot food delivery to the streets of San Francisco. TechCrunch spotted the Marble vehicles earlier in the month and the duo made their official announcement late last week.

The Yelp Eat24 use of the Marble robots works the same as their normal delivery service; the company works with about 40,000 restaurants but offers delivery as an opt-in feature the restaurant can use for an additional fee. Marble effectively becomes another delivery vendor for Yelp, collecting a fee for each trip and yes – robots do accept tips.

CNET takes a look at both Starship and Marble sidewalk delivery robots.

Marble’s robots are built to be modular – these particular models are designed for quick food delivery, with a pod that can hold a bag that keeps food cold or warm. But the cargo area could also be designed to carry other goods like medicine and could even be outfitted to have an onboard oven to actively cook food as it travels.

Marble is a direct competitor to Starship and offering delivery in San Francisco is upping the game; Starship announced earlier this year that it would start delivering in Washington, D.C. via delivery partner Postmates and in Redwood City, CA using DoorDash.

Both Marble and Starship have committed to sending human “chaperones” with the sidewalk robots for their early journeys. Marble said it was in order to answer questions about the robot to interested pedestrians, but it’s probably also to gather qualitative data about how people react to the robots and what real life risks they might encounter.

It’s not a surprise that the market for food delivery in the U.S. is so hot – 2015 was the first year that Americans spent more on takeout food than they did on traditional groceries. Not only that, but millennials – the generation quickly taking over the baby boomers in size and buying power – indicate that they are more eager than most to order prepared takeout food. If companies can figure out how to reliably deliver that food without lots of overhead and outsource a lower skilled job to friendly robots, the way we get our food a decade from now will be drastically different.

Robot food delivery is probably just the beginning; as Marble’s modular build suggests, the opportunity for having other goods delivered is real and could easily be accomplished by a partnership with a healthcare system (medicine) or a retail giant like Target or Walmart. Amazon competition, anyone?

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.”