To own or not to own delivery? Grocers reassess the Instacart dilemma.

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

Doordash and Uber both emerged as leaders delivering from individual stores to individual customers. However, both have been expanding into owned microwarehouses as this model could be more profitable in certain categories, like convenience, grocery, and other consumer categories.

Third-party delivery platforms, as they’ve been built, just seem like the wrong model, but instead of testing, failing, and evolving, they’ve been subsidized into market dominance. Maybe the right model is a wholly-owned supply chain like Domino’s. Maybe it’s some ghost kitchen / delivery platform hybrid. Maybe it’s just small networks of restauran... See more