Just Eat Takeaway and New Solutions to Old Problems

How did we get to a place where billions of dollars are exchanged in millions of business transactions but there are no winners? My co-host Can and my restaurant friend both defaulted to the notion “delivery is a shitty margin business” when discussing this post. But I don’t think that’s sufficient here. Delivery can work. Just look at a Domino’s s... See more

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

The strategy is largely out of the same playbook as other on-demand apps—capture customers, consolidate control over a high-frequency behavior, expand and cross-sell to other higher-margin categories. But their challenges are significant as well, from spoilage rates on grocery to hard-to-predict inventory requirements and building relationships wit... See more

Grubhub was early to the food delivery game and unlike its VC-backed competitors, it was consistently profitable. That its business model worked should have given Grubhub a leg up, but what it actually meant was that the company was playing a different game from competitors bloated with venture capital and untethered to things like profit and unit ... See more