Despite these enormous acquisitions and partnerships, delivery app giants struggle to reach profitability, even while charging feeble restaurants exorbitant fees. From this viewpoint, the food delivery ecosystem is broken. It’s one of the reasons why smaller, more localized delivery services have emerged with a new focus: to help restaurants market... See more

Postmates and DoorDash pursued this growth-at-all cost mindset so aggressively that they listed restaurants and stores that weren’t even signed up for either service. Doing so let both scale supply faster than a sales team would have been able to, but it obliterated the unit economics early on. Because neither were integrated on the backend of the... See more

The most important shift in restaurants in the past decade has been the rise of online ordering and delivery. UberEats, Postmates, Doordash, and a handful of other apps have been knife-fighting (in extremely uneconomical ways) for the privilege of becoming food delivery aggregators. Own enough customer demand, the thinking goes, and not only will... See more