Consumer packaged goods aren’t the only products being disrupted by digital commerce (see p. 150). The foodservice industry is also experiencing an influx of players trying to make mealtime more convenient via online ordering and delivery.
“The trend in this country is convenience. So I think delivery plays very strongly,” Dunkin’ Brands chairman and CEO Nigel Travis, whose company has joined Starbucks, McDonald’s, Chipotle and Taco Bell in announcing plans to test food delivery, told CNBC in June. “I think the next few years you’re going to see us get more and more into delivery.”
“The No. 1 requested thing we get through social media is Taco Bell delivery,” Taco Bell CEO Brian Niccol recently told Fortune. “If we can deliver Taco Bell, we’ll satisfy a lot of young people in America, that’s for sure.”
And in early July, it began testing delivery in 90 cities in Texas and California through delivery service DoorDash.
On the c-store front, 7-Eleven has teamed with urban delivery service Postmates in San Francisco and Austin to bring CPG and foodservice items to people’s doors. The company expects to expand the service to other cities that have a high number of 7-Eleven stores, including Chicago.
Be they online behemoths or local startups, third-party services such as Postmates are driving the growth of delivery. Uber is offering weekday lunch delivery in select cities; GrubHub Seamless continues to enter new markets by purchasing competitors; and Amazon Local in Seattle allows customers to place orders from a select number of restaurants and charge it to their Amazon accounts. Chipotle is testing its delivery program with Postmates, and Starbucks is testing two models—one with Postmates and one with its own team of barista runners called Green Apron.
Another disruptor at play is the rise of restaurants built purely for the purpose of delivering meals—with no dining room or even a walk-up counter. The food is ordered via mobile app and cooked in a commissary-style kitchen. Sprig, Maple and Munchery are among the delivery-only concepts popping up, and equity firms and big-name backers are pouring millions of dollars into the movement. —Additional reporting by Sara Rush
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