Sublime

What is it about the food delivery platform business? Restaurants are hurt. The primary labor is treated poorly. And the businesses themselves are terrible.

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 r... See more

Where CloudKitchens and its peers rely on centralized processing and a flattened, undifferentiated business model, Tock starts from the assumption of distributed processing and a business model that differentiates on its prime costs: labor and ingredients.

Across the street, a row of fast-casual chains, whose names and visual identities insist on modesty and anonymity: Just Salad, Just Food For Dogs, Blank Street Coffee. (This raft of normcore brands finds its opposite in the ghost kitchens down the block, which all for some reason are called things like Fuck Your Little Bitch Burrito.) Up ahead is a... See more