Suggested by 
Brett Wischow
over 2 years ago
Food delivery is a critical piece of infrastructure for local restaurants, but Uber/Doordash/etc are taking a disproportionate amount of the revenue from meals to subsidize expanding into other markets, lobby national gov, and to line shareholder pockets (in theory). Some local restaurants have started forming Co-ops to run these services as a non-profit. I think there is an unmet need to build technology to help facilitate this local pushback against big tech.
Are you interested in addressing this Unmet Need?
EIR @ Elevate
The team at https://empower.delivery/ is building a novel solution to compete in this space. DD & others seems to be on the J curve to narrow the amount of competition, but the quality of food and drivers represent the lower half of options. Reframing the customer experience with better food and an engaged relationship can be disruptive
Founder, MD @ PivotNorth Capital
what is interesting is doordash is losing big money even at their big scale. -12% net income at just 35% growth rate. so not a lot of excess profits to grab from them. do you think they are doing it wrong/efficiently? they get to amortize driver sourcing costs against both people and food delivery. have big driver density so drive time to the pickup spot is short. curious where the margin is here to find.
Chief Growth Officer @ Platform Venture Studio
TLDR: Margin is there, but it will require a systemic shift from the way things currently work. Longer version: Doordash and Uber are losing money not because of operations expenses but because of the massive marketing overhead to try to compete on drivers and consumers. If you look at the dollars and cents, most local delivery operations could be run purely off of customer fees that doordash and uber charge. That would be without the 20-30% fee that the platforms charge local restaurants. Yes, scale helps these types of operations to a certain point, but the actual operational benefits diminish dramatically once you get past the city scale. The only remaining scale benefit is from the consumer perspective of not having to download another app.
Advisor
Emerging from the pandemic is bringing opportunities and challenges to local restaurants. 1) The expectation is that every restaurant (regardless of cuisine) has mastered the take out/delivery experience and 2) the push to motivate employees back to the office means upleveling the food experience (ie - communiting back for Chipotle = meh). Mobydish.com is empowering local restaurants to fulfill larger scale catering events for offices, they take on booking, delivery and setup, while the restaurant can stay focused on the food.
Brand & Strategy Consultant @ DBH Consulting
Here in the Bay area, Feastin is perhaps doing what you're talking about -- they have a group of eateries they deliver from (both meals and groceries) and seem to be quite local here.
There are some turnkey marketplace software available that may be used for local eateries (e.g. things that build on Woocommerce or standalone platforms like Sharetribe) but of course, it is necessary for someone to manage the marketplace and the local eatery owner is not necessarily into that role.
I have been interested in finding a way to support California's budding cottage food industry with similar marketplace software. The cottage food industry has some additional regulatory limits to distribution that make it more difficult than it is for restaurants to deliver though.
your link to ZEEW.eu looks ver interesting as well!
CEO | Founder | Managing Partner @ Platform Venture Studio
@Brett Wischow - a VC mentioned this one to me today: https://zeew.eu/
Chief Growth Officer @ Platform Venture Studio
Super interesting. Seems like a great solution in a world where restaurants have an easier solution to creating these co-ops. I wonder how they handle the couriers. That is the big problem in replacing a Doordash or Ubereats, and why these marketplaces have succeeded so dramatically. They created a larger pool of couriers to help even out demand between restaurants. With only one restaurant on an app, it requires a driver to be "standing by", unless they use a service like postmates maybe? For a while Postmates was basically serving as a white-label courier marketplace.