fastcompany.com

A lot of what you hear and read about the big delivery networks — DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, etc. — is that they’re a terrible economic deal for restaurants. It’s an especially tough tradeoff for neighborhood restaurants and startups, which don’t have much leverage or much profit margin to spare.

Most grocery stores have now begun to offer some form of their own in-house delivery, some of which are profitable. These profitable models generally have higher minimum order requirements, markups on items, non-flexible delivery windows (often multiple deliveries are pooled into one driver trip to save costs), and an unclear view into what product... See more

Before the pandemic, delivery apps made sense to drive incremental sales for restaurants that primarily made money on dine-in customers, says Chris Monk, founder and chief executive of Your Fare, an Austin, Texas-based startup that sells a system to restaurants for consolidating orders from delivery services. For most restaurants, though, the math ... See more

Delivery-only restaurants will evolve faster as setup costs drop.

It’s a bit of a different situation for fast-casual chains operating at scale, where the delivery networks sit somewhere on the spectrum between “necessary evil” and “incremental growth driver.”