I don't know why but i kept forgetting what that meant and seeing the acronym over and over bothered me. Future looks bright in this area, looking forward to seeing what happens
When do the DSPs start to vertically integrate - setting up their own dark mega kitchens, with generic styles like 'Pizza', 'Thai', 'Chinese', 'Indian'? These could appear as different restaurants, but in reality operate out of the same facility.
In this way the batching could be done even more efficiently, and orders would be coming from one mega-kitchen, with huge economies of scale.
Uber Eats is sort of experimenting in this area with "popup" restaurants, only the cooking is done by their existing suppliers. For example, there is a local Puerto Rican restaurant that has a "pop-up" that offers a few Asian dishes. You can't walk into that restaurant and order the Asian food.
I used to live in Dublin until recently and coming from a country (Greece) where food/coffee delivery is free (apart from any tip), fast and ubiquitous, I was taken aback by the fact I had to pay a substantial delivery fee.
The upside was that driver safety seemed to be taken more seriously (it's a cutthroat business in Greece and drivers are pushed to their limit, accidents being rather frequent in their line of work).
Reading between the lines, the only real opportunity for a sustainable moat is the dark kitchens and order batching. This has been tried and failed a few times already, my guess is the secret ingredients are scale and marketing.
Delivery from traditional restaurants is just too low margin, historically it was done by only some types of restaurants at break-even or even a slight loss to increase demand, now that people are used to paying $6-10 premium, once the music stops and the VC money stops flowing, the restaurants that stay in business will easily adapt.
The tools required for a marketplace that connects people to existing restaurants and a "marketplace" that connects people to multiple "restaurants" that are in reality all from the same dark kitchen are pretty different. The former only requires staff, the latter requires real estate, equipment and product in addition to staff. It's essentially building a restaurant with a tech component, not building a tech product.
I skimmed through the slides and didn't see a single word allocated to the problem of the waste, pollution, and health effects generated by these services or any costs involved in managing them. Perhaps the figure of $365 billion is a convenient fiction, as is so often the case when modern young "entrepreneurs" see an opportunity to upend the underpinnings of society for profit.
Food isn't a problem we solve with megacorporations and apps and technology. Food isn't supposed to be optimized and analyzed and held to KPIs. Food is best when communities of people come together to participate and interact and nourish one another. All these services do is enslave and silo us away from each other so that the individual's essential needs for nutrition and community can become a profit stream in a corporation's ledger. They would build yet another layer in America's enormous neurosis around food. No thanks, Google.
Food isn't a problem we solve with megacorporations and apps. Food is a problem we solve with agricultural production at scale and shipping and logistics. Food is best when it's nourishing and nutritious and where people are in sufficient quantities to cover everyone's needs with foods they are familiar with.
This is just my own wildly unreasonable opinion, but perhaps we could consider the possibilities to be realized by shelving the romance of participation and community and unity until we've got the logistics solved. Rather than trying to tell people how they should relate to food, maybe we should focus on making sure everyone has enough and that an obsession with hyperlocalism isn't setting the world up for more famine.
Perhaps then people can choose how to relate to food and how to nourish their communities. I'm certain that many people will choose exactly what you describe.
Okay, but how is optimization of delivery not going to help address waste, pollution, and health effects. We have so much abundance in Western nations that we fail at times to understand how much optimization through technology, apps, and whatnot, will still provide benefit.
From reducing wasted food by ensuring only what is needed is on hand and in the channel. Covering pollution by reducing trips made by many to fewer delivery groups. To health by offering better choices as part of the service, new menu options never considered because they were not previously available.
The food abundance did not come way of the government but instead by corporations and individuals trying to improve their position in society all the while providing services and goods with improved the lives of others. If anything tariffs and food regulatory groups make food more expensive by preventing our access to other producers and products.
If you live on takeaway food, yes. I work for a DSP company partnering with Just Eat and I also do a lot of home cooking with local non-intensive produce.
Food delivery is way too expensive for most people to cater for every meal. A Friday night treat after a rough week has its rightful place in the world.
As for pollution, food is increasingly being delivered by bicycle in many cities here in Europe.
This is another instance where investors step in and ruin small businesses in an attempt to achieve a monopoly position by building a platform for an existing type of service.
As illustrated by the following snippets from the article:
> Restaurants are struggling to adapt as they are aggregated by DSPs
and
> No DSP has been able to prove consistent profitability with their existing business model.
I think those snippets demonstrate that asking teenagers to take things over to the neighbor's place does not require a global logistics network. If you insert one, you're just handing another slice of a thin pie out while losing control over that part of your business.
And yeah, it is rather annoying to see too much money chasing bad ideas screwing up local businesses. Uber is a cautionary lesson; apps are not magic pixie dust and the cut has to come from somewhere.
Food delivery platforms will get centralized. If not by investors, By Amazon. By someone.
Why ? Because consumers want that. It's more convenient. And probably network effects apply here.
With food delivery centralized, Dark, big centralized kitchens will win over restaurants(for most popular meals). They're just cheaper. It's just specialization and higher volume.
Long term, making delivered food isn't a good place for a small business. And that'll happen with subsidies or without.
BTW: in the future, in most industries, a small business will only survive by making rare and unique things.
Forgive me but as someone who has a fridge, microwave, stove and oven, delivery does not appeal to me.
There is a whole frozen pizza in the store that sells for 3 dollars, and a slice of pizza from the 7-11 that goes for 2 dollars. Pizza delivery is the one food where delivery has matured, and even today it's a very limited buy.
When do people do it?
Parties -> Almost any demographic
Workload is too high to go out -> Students and younger adults
Going outside is extremely uncomfortable and/or dangerous -> Primarily older
Unmotivated and lazy -> A small fraction of any demographic
The thing that can finally drop prices as we know it is the quadricopter. A self navigating delivery channel has at least reasonable chance to bring the price well into tolerable levels for most americans.
You assume the unmotivated and lazy are a small fraction of any demographic. I have an unqualified feeling that it is a big portion, and that it is growing. I hear too many references to netflix tv shows, and a lack of conversations that spark my curiosity. I hear of people not sleeping to catch the latest episodes that aired in another country first.
Yeah, markdown or something like it would be a nice flourish. But I guess HN kinda likes to keep it simple instead. shrug (hey -- that's some formatting right there)
Every time I see a delivery bike out with a huge backpack full of food, I feel as a society we've gone a bit wrong.
1) The delivery rider/driver is making nothing
2) We are packaging every piece of food and sauce in single use plastic
3) The restaurants are losing money (though this is being addressed somewhat)
4) People aren't leaving their homes for the 5 minutes it takes to walk down the street and support a local business.
I really hope this is a trend that goes away, but I doubt it will.
Question: How hard would it be to write create open source components to run a DSP collaboratively, e.g. with the power asymmetry created by aggregation
The same argument was made for an open source Uber, and I think it's a noble idea, but it appears the problems of routing and competition are complex enough that it just doesn't work.
I expected nothing less from somebody who worked for Uber.
I mean sure, investors will (pardon the pun) eat the ideas up. There is, after all, money to be made. But the overall state of our industry, where people feel very comfortable discussing business models with a prefix of "Ethics aside" is depressing as hell.
Let's not even mention the problem of externalities, of impact on rural communities, of the immense problems that consolidation will bring, or of the exploitive nature of the "gig economy"
[+] [-] mocha_nate|6 years ago|reply
I don't know why but i kept forgetting what that meant and seeing the acronym over and over bothered me. Future looks bright in this area, looking forward to seeing what happens
[+] [-] plausibilities|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Creationer|6 years ago|reply
In this way the batching could be done even more efficiently, and orders would be coming from one mega-kitchen, with huge economies of scale.
[+] [-] theriddlr|6 years ago|reply
Then you have new delivery-only brands such as Mac Shack – with the food being prepared in the kitchens of Bella Italia chain restaurants.
[+] [-] chrisa|6 years ago|reply
They actually license the recipes from local well known restaurants, and then cook them in their own kitchen and deliver them.
[+] [-] Consultant32452|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddeokbokki|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lvoudour|6 years ago|reply
The upside was that driver safety seemed to be taken more seriously (it's a cutthroat business in Greece and drivers are pushed to their limit, accidents being rather frequent in their line of work).
[+] [-] chrisseaton|6 years ago|reply
How much does a cup of coffee cost if the price includes delivery?
And does every food item include enough cost to support delivery independently? How do they amortise the delivery costs across an order?
[+] [-] jerkstate|6 years ago|reply
Delivery from traditional restaurants is just too low margin, historically it was done by only some types of restaurants at break-even or even a slight loss to increase demand, now that people are used to paying $6-10 premium, once the music stops and the VC money stops flowing, the restaurants that stay in business will easily adapt.
[+] [-] noer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dqdo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corey_moncure|6 years ago|reply
Food isn't a problem we solve with megacorporations and apps and technology. Food isn't supposed to be optimized and analyzed and held to KPIs. Food is best when communities of people come together to participate and interact and nourish one another. All these services do is enslave and silo us away from each other so that the individual's essential needs for nutrition and community can become a profit stream in a corporation's ledger. They would build yet another layer in America's enormous neurosis around food. No thanks, Google.
[+] [-] Kalium|6 years ago|reply
This is just my own wildly unreasonable opinion, but perhaps we could consider the possibilities to be realized by shelving the romance of participation and community and unity until we've got the logistics solved. Rather than trying to tell people how they should relate to food, maybe we should focus on making sure everyone has enough and that an obsession with hyperlocalism isn't setting the world up for more famine.
Perhaps then people can choose how to relate to food and how to nourish their communities. I'm certain that many people will choose exactly what you describe.
[+] [-] Shivetya|6 years ago|reply
From reducing wasted food by ensuring only what is needed is on hand and in the channel. Covering pollution by reducing trips made by many to fewer delivery groups. To health by offering better choices as part of the service, new menu options never considered because they were not previously available.
The food abundance did not come way of the government but instead by corporations and individuals trying to improve their position in society all the while providing services and goods with improved the lives of others. If anything tariffs and food regulatory groups make food more expensive by preventing our access to other producers and products.
[+] [-] seanhandley|6 years ago|reply
Food delivery is way too expensive for most people to cater for every meal. A Friday night treat after a rough week has its rightful place in the world.
As for pollution, food is increasingly being delivered by bicycle in many cities here in Europe.
[+] [-] frogpelt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] coldtea|6 years ago|reply
I'd like to see a future of food delivery which is less food delivery, more time to spend at home, more cooking and healthy choices.
But of course, as an endeavor whose main end goal is money, the future of food delivery has to be "more, more, more".
[+] [-] amelius|6 years ago|reply
As illustrated by the following snippets from the article:
> Restaurants are struggling to adapt as they are aggregated by DSPs
and
> No DSP has been able to prove consistent profitability with their existing business model.
[+] [-] _jal|6 years ago|reply
And yeah, it is rather annoying to see too much money chasing bad ideas screwing up local businesses. Uber is a cautionary lesson; apps are not magic pixie dust and the cut has to come from somewhere.
[+] [-] yhoiseth|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petra|6 years ago|reply
Food delivery platforms will get centralized. If not by investors, By Amazon. By someone.
Why ? Because consumers want that. It's more convenient. And probably network effects apply here.
With food delivery centralized, Dark, big centralized kitchens will win over restaurants(for most popular meals). They're just cheaper. It's just specialization and higher volume.
Long term, making delivered food isn't a good place for a small business. And that'll happen with subsidies or without.
BTW: in the future, in most industries, a small business will only survive by making rare and unique things.
[+] [-] not_a_cop75|6 years ago|reply
There is a whole frozen pizza in the store that sells for 3 dollars, and a slice of pizza from the 7-11 that goes for 2 dollars. Pizza delivery is the one food where delivery has matured, and even today it's a very limited buy.
When do people do it?
Parties -> Almost any demographic
Workload is too high to go out -> Students and younger adults
Going outside is extremely uncomfortable and/or dangerous -> Primarily older
Unmotivated and lazy -> A small fraction of any demographic
The thing that can finally drop prices as we know it is the quadricopter. A self navigating delivery channel has at least reasonable chance to bring the price well into tolerable levels for most americans.
[+] [-] MlkedChocolate|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeternus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitchtbaum|6 years ago|reply
* [Communal apartment - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment)
* [Communal dining - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_dining)
* [Soup kitchen - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_kitchen)
* [Factory-kitchen - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory-kitchen)
* [Perpetual stew - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew)
* [Bhandara (community kitchen) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhandara_(community_kitchen))
* [Coliving - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coliving)
* [Campus Kitchen - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_Kitchen)
* [DC Central Kitchen - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Central_Kitchen)
* [Karma Kitchen: Growing in Generosity](http://www.karmakitchen.org/)
* ...
* ...
* ...
* ...
[+] [-] wyldfire|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedalpete|6 years ago|reply
1) The delivery rider/driver is making nothing 2) We are packaging every piece of food and sauce in single use plastic 3) The restaurants are losing money (though this is being addressed somewhat) 4) People aren't leaving their homes for the 5 minutes it takes to walk down the street and support a local business.
I really hope this is a trend that goes away, but I doubt it will.
[+] [-] mtrn|6 years ago|reply
> aggregated by DSPs
removed?
[+] [-] pedalpete|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dpflan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] groby_b|6 years ago|reply
I expected nothing less from somebody who worked for Uber.
I mean sure, investors will (pardon the pun) eat the ideas up. There is, after all, money to be made. But the overall state of our industry, where people feel very comfortable discussing business models with a prefix of "Ethics aside" is depressing as hell.
Let's not even mention the problem of externalities, of impact on rural communities, of the immense problems that consolidation will bring, or of the exploitive nature of the "gig economy"
[1] Slide 25: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v9ifaW1Sxy_oVUtzn63B...
[+] [-] itronitron|6 years ago|reply