

This is a really interesting deal for both parties. In return, Amazon will receive options to purchase 2% of GrubHub’s parent company JustEat, which can rise to 15% depending on the number of new customers that the arrangement creates for GrubHub. The deal will see GrubHub+ membership provided to all Amazon Prime members for a year, which allows them to access free delivery and members-only benefits. The Amazon and GrubHub deal explainedĪmazon wants the piece of the pie. Investors are holding strong in the belief that the sector will be able to reach profitability, and with sufficient scale this has the potential to generate significant profits. Other innovations include improvements ranging from the simplistic, such as routing of orders and stacking multiple orders together, to the somewhat outrageous, like the use of delivery robots.

One of the fastest growing in recent times are ‘dark kitchens’ which operate without a front of house and offer food for delivery only. There are many ways that the industry is looking to tackle this. Many are prepared to operate the delivery service as a loss leader to be a marketing exercise for their restaurant, but as the percentage of deliveries creeps up the economics get wonky. They operate on razor thin margins, and there are limited areas to improve those based on their current operating model.įor example, restaurants tend to operate with profit margins of between 7 and 22%, and, yet, delivery services will generally charge the restaurant a commission of between 15 to 30%. Between March and May when lockdowns were at their most severe, demand shot through the roof and has continued to rise at a much greater rate than pre-pandemic levels.ĭespite huge increases in demand and revenue, food delivery services are struggling for profitability. Prior to March 2020, food delivery sales were increasing at a healthy 7 - 8% per year. Growth has been steady for a number of years now, but it accelerated rapidly after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Currently, the market is dominated by four companies, DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats and Postmates, which has been owned by Uber Eats since 2020. There are a huge number of services fighting for market share, with new startups arriving on the scene all the time. The industry has come a long way since the early days of World Wide Waiter. Pioneering startup World Wide Waiter started in California in 1995 and still exists today as, but it has been well and truly taken over by other companies since then. Online food delivery has exploded in recent years, but its history in the U.S. Turbulent times in the food delivery industry
