GrubHub moves into food delivery

GrubHub is getting into the delivery business.

For the past decade, the Chicago-based technology company's primary business was providing an online platform for restaurants to accept orders. Now it's going to offer delivery service, too.

GrubHub said this morning during an earnings announcement that it's buying two restaurant-delivery services—Dining In and Restaurants on the Run—for about $80 million. That means GrubHub, which provides order-taking capability for 30,000 restaurants, will offer delivery services for about 3,000 restaurants.

Jazzfood wrote:Problem is it costs the restaurants around 20% and won't allow you to add the expense into the pricing. Just had a meeting last wk about it. So already low margins are even lower.

(02:24:05) me: why not for the full amount, if I may know?
(02:24:32) CSR: The processing and delivery fee. The meal was delivered and the processing is for using the GH service.
(02:25:34) me: considering the circumstances, GH should be the first party willing to give up their fee
(02:26:51) CSR: I totally understand that thought. And I will be sure to pass on the suggestion
(02:27:07) me: i mean, saying the food was picked up when it hadn't been is hardly worthy of charging the customer a fee
(02:28:52) CSR: One moment please

ronnie_suburban wrote:it was ice cold, soggy and spent.

Cathy2 wrote:I will guess the refund they offered will result in the restaurant who prepared the food not getting paid.

Cathy2 wrote:Since the restaurant alerted you the food was waiting for GrubHub to collect, it seems especially poor form GH made sure they themselves were whole.

Cathy2 wrote:Why not take issue via your credit card company?

Uber Technologies Inc. has made an offer to acquire food-delivery startup Grubhub Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg News reports.

user named u/KendallNeff placed a Grubhub order from a place called Pasqually's Pizza & Wings, believing that she was doing her part to support a local business. But when she received her food, she was slightly suspicious about where it really came from. "Just curious," she texted her Grubhub driver. "Was this food from Chuck E. Cheese?"....
Philadelphia isn't the only place where Chuck E. Cheese is offering to-go pizza from "Pasqually's." There are dozens of Grubhub listings for Pasqually's, from Denton, Texas to Oceanside, California, to Skokie, Illinois, and all of them share an address with Chuck E. Cheese.

bweiny wrote:If you believe GrubHub, ...

Vitesse98 wrote:Anyone see this funny and sad piece on Doordash and their economically counterintuitive practices?

https://themargins.substack.com/p/doord ... -arbitrage

Vitesse98 wrote:Anyone see this funny and sad piece on Doordash and their economically counterintuitive practices?

Vitesse98 wrote:Anyone see this funny and sad piece on Doordash and their economically counterintuitive practices?
https://themargins.substack.com/p/doord ... -arbitrage

bweiny wrote:If you believe GrubHub, you might think a new, likely independently owned (semi?-)authentic pizza restaurant has opened in Skokie. But it's just GrubHub's alias for Chuck E. Cheese.

Though it's a few weeks old, I came across this Food & Wine article today, with third-party delivery app scrutiny all the rage.
Trying to Support a Local Pizza Joint? Just Make Sure It Isn't Actually Chuck E. Cheese

user named u/KendallNeff placed a Grubhub order from a place called Pasqually's Pizza & Wings, believing that she was doing her part to support a local business. But when she received her food, she was slightly suspicious about where it really came from. "Just curious," she texted her Grubhub driver. "Was this food from Chuck E. Cheese?"....
Philadelphia isn't the only place where Chuck E. Cheese is offering to-go pizza from "Pasqually's." There are dozens of Grubhub listings for Pasqually's, from Denton, Texas to Oceanside, California, to Skokie, Illinois, and all of them share an address with Chuck E. Cheese.

If you thought this would cause a course correction, you'd be wrong. Pasqually's Pizza & Wings remains a result among Skokie pizza options.
Pasqually's Pizza & Wings
h/t to G Wiv for posting links with a specific label so I can see how it's done.

Just Eat Takeaway to Acquire Grubhub for $7.3 Billion

Just Eat Takeaway to Acquire Grubhub for $7.3 Billion

bweiny wrote:It doesn't seem like it should be rocket science for the restaurant industry to fund coding for a platform that they can all use that takes no cut. The lack of an aggressive counter-attack from the victims has been sad.

JoelF wrote:The problem is that the "Restaurant Industry" isn't a single voting bloc. Even if they all feel the same way, there's no muscle there: Each restaurant negotiates with GrubHub, and not from a place of strength: "If you want your food delivered, do what we say - the next pizza place down the street caved, they'll get your business."

I'm sure the chain restaurants, and maybe bigger groups like Lettuce, One-Off, Boka, are able to negotiate better terms. But without some union-like negotiating body where they can say, "None of us will let you deliver our food unless you give us these terms", the best hope might be lobbying for state regulation of those delivery services.

Giving the delivery service a small cut is not unreasonable: They're providing marketing in addition to the delivery. But the size of the cut should be based on service-level agreements: customer ratings, volume, etc. The 30+% kickbacks I'm hearing about just aren't sustainable for the restaurants.

bweiny wrote:If you believe GrubHub, you might think a new, likely independently owned (semi?-)authentic pizza restaurant has opened in Skokie. But it's just GrubHub's alias for Chuck E. Cheese.

Though it's a few weeks old, I came across this Food & Wine article today, with third-party delivery app scrutiny all the rage.
Trying to Support a Local Pizza Joint? Just Make Sure It Isn't Actually Chuck E. Cheese

user named u/KendallNeff placed a Grubhub order from a place called Pasqually's Pizza & Wings, believing that she was doing her part to support a local business. But when she received her food, she was slightly suspicious about where it really came from. "Just curious," she texted her Grubhub driver. "Was this food from Chuck E. Cheese?"....
Philadelphia isn't the only place where Chuck E. Cheese is offering to-go pizza from "Pasqually's." There are dozens of Grubhub listings for Pasqually's, from Denton, Texas to Oceanside, California, to Skokie, Illinois, and all of them share an address with Chuck E. Cheese.

If you thought this would cause a course correction, you'd be wrong. Pasqually's Pizza & Wings remains a result among Skokie pizza options.
Pasqually's Pizza & Wings
h/t to G Wiv for posting links with a specific label so I can see how it's done.

at newyorker.com, Anna Wiener wrote:Last fall, walking down Mission Street, in San Francisco, I noticed a new addition to an otherwise unremarkable parking lot at the base of Bernal Heights Hill: a large, white trailer, about the size of three parking spaces, plastered with a banner that read “food pick up here.” On one side was a list of restaurant brands with names and logos that seemed algorithmically generated: WokTalk, Burger Bytes, Fork and Ladle, Umami, American Eclectic Burger, Wings & Things. The trailer was hooked up to a generator, which was positioned behind two portable toilets; it occupied parking spots once reserved for Maven, an hourly-car-rental startup, funded by General Motors and marketed to gig-economy workers. (G.M. shut down Maven in April.) Through a small window cut into the side, I could see two men moving around what appeared to be a kitchen. The generator hummed; the air carried the comforting smell of fryer oil; the toilets were padlocked. One of the men came to the window and apologized: I couldn’t order food directly, he told me—I would have to order through the apps.

The trailer, along with a few others in San Francisco, is operated by Reef Technology, a startup based in Miami. According to marketing materials, Reef creates “thriving hubs for the on-demand economy” by “reimagining the common parking lot.” By bringing in utilities like electricity, gas, and water, and setting up “proprietary containers,” the company hopes to turn parking lots into reconfigurable community hubs. Lots might be “formatted” to include mobile kitchens, beer gardens, retail pop-ups, vertical farms, auto-body shops, medical services, rental stations for electric vehicles, and so on. “We have these pods, which arguably are not pretty, but they’re functional. They can support any kind of application,” Ari Ojalvo, the C.E.O. of Reef, told me. “If you want to put a grocery store in there, put a grocery store in there. Laundry, put laundry.” Ojalvo compares his company to Apple: just as the App Store allows developers to create and sell iOS-based tools and services, so Reef provides infrastructure for parking-based businesses. “Apple uses connectivity as a platform; we use proximity as a platform. We allow third-party applications to stand on this proximity platform and get closer to consumers,” he said.

Ojalvo and one of his three co-founders, Umut Tekin, met as undergraduates at Northwestern University, in the late nineteen-nineties. After graduation, both worked as management consultants: Tekin in technology, and Ojalvo focused on supply-chain optimization. They started their company in 2013, in Miami, under the name ParkJockey, and initially offered an app for reserving parking spaces in advance, which launched the following year in London and Chicago. The app included a back-end service for parking operators, and the company continued to build out its garage-management software. In 2018, ParkJockey raised nearly a billion dollars from SoftBank Vision Fund, and acquired the two largest parking operators in North America, Impark and Citizens Parking. In the trade publication Parking Today, publisher John Van Horn speculated about the repercussions of ParkJockey’s ascent. “I have received a number of calls from operators across the fruited plain asking about ParkJockey,” Van Horn wrote. “Who are they? What does their software do? Yikes, are we prey?” Shortly after the acquisitions, the company changed its name to Reef, to evoke a thriving ecosystem. It now manages 1.3 million parking spaces in forty-five hundred locations—city centers and residential neighborhoods, as well as airports, hospitals, stadiums, and hotels—in Canada and the United States. (Tekin left the company in 2019.)

In the past, Reef has pitched itself as anticipating a world in which autonomous cars are the norm, and fleets of self-driving ride-share vehicles make parking mostly obsolete. In such a world, parking lots would have to be repurposed. Over the past two years, though, the company’s narrative has changed somewhat: Reef’s executives now emphasize their work in “creating the next phase of a neighborhood” by forming local logistics and mobility hubs. This year, Reef launched a partnership with Bond, a logistics startup that operates “nano-warehouses”: fulfillment centers, often in vacant storefronts, that can be used for last-mile delivery. City-dwellers may someday pick up their Amazon packages and clamshell-carton dinners in a parking lot or empty retail space, like college students dipping into the campus center before retreating back to the dorms.

For now, though, Reef is focussing on food preparation as a test case—a proof of concept for other sorts of “applications” that might make sense in some later, future time. Food prep is a sensible first experiment for Reef’s modular approach to repurposing parking lots: over the past few years, delivery has been on the upswing, and delivery-only kitchens—referred to as “ghost kitchens” or “dark kitchens”—are having a moment. Reef operates kitchens across eighteen cities in the United States, in seventy-odd parking lots. In the trailer on Mission Street, meals from all six of the advertised restaurants are prepared on site—the culinary equivalent of a multicolor retractable pen. The restaurants are “internal” to Reef: designed and staffed by its employees, with menus developed by a culinary team that includes former executives from Roti Modern Mediterranean, Potbelly, and Jamba Juice. The menus lean toward comfort food, and are a little arbitrary. Wings & Things offers mozzarella sticks, chicken tenders, cronuts (“dusted with cinnamon maple sugar and served with a side of Canadian Maple dipping sauce”), Skittles, Red Bull, and two kinds of Greek-yogurt bowls.

Currently, the food offered by Reef’s internal brands comes from US Foods, a food distributor that works with colleges, hotels, and hospitals, and is a wholesale supplier for independent restaurants and diners. In San Francisco, the menu items are delivered to a central commissary in the Bayview area, and come individually wrapped; precise assembly instructions are provided to line cooks. Every night, Reef’s trailers, which are managed under a subsidiary, Vessel CA, return to the commissary, where the gray-water tanks are drained, the potable-water tanks are refilled, and the refrigerators are restocked. Reef has ambitions to offer fresher, more sophisticated fare, eventually. But, for now, customers may find themselves paying a premium for meals similar to those found at a fast-food restaurant, or in a supermarket freezer.

Restaurant delivery services such as Uber Eats and DoorDash can again impose higher fees on Chicago restaurants, setting up another potential showdown with City Hall over reinstating caps on such charges to help eateries struggling during the pandemic.

DoorDash has named Stephanie Izard of Girl & the Goat as its first chief restaurant adviser. The chef and restaurant owner will work as a go-between for the third-party delivery company and the restaurants that sell food on its app.