Who Is Winning the Food Delivery War? | Hacker News Reader

Who Is Winning the Food Delivery War?

priceonomics.com

A tangent - but I live in Jakarta, Indonesia. Here around 2 years ago a local motorbike ride-sharing startup called Gojek so ago switched on a service called go-food. There legion of drivers would now pick up any food from any restaurant you wanted and drop it to you.

It killed most food delivery startups within a few weeks, they have since expanded the service to allow pickup of pretty much anything. Supermarkets, convenience stores, toyshops, pharmacies, pet-shops, hardware. Theres even a generic option to buy "something" from a shop at "address".

Its pretty easy to look at this and think this is the end-game in developed countries too. For at least those purchases where convenience and timing is a factor and cost not as much. All these disparate products are actually a very similar UX and solving the same problem.

Regular grocery shopping behaviour (or the startups running deliveries) hasn't been much effected, presumably as its a more bespoke use case.

In the dotcom there was a famous example of arbitrary shopping-deliver-as-a-service called Kozmo.com. The problem in western countries is that the wages for delivery cannot possibly work for the way people use such services. It's not even clear this will work well for restaurants outside of specific affluent areas.

> On average, customers go to physical grocery stores 3.2 times per month

This seems crazy to me -- not only must be purchases be enormous, but fresh meats and vegetables don't keep for 9 days between each visit. Am I missing something?

The average consumer doesn't buy fresh produce, but buys things that are frozen or canned.

Exactly. This is telling us more what is being eaten and it isn't fresh produce.

That doesn't sound that weird to me. Two things:

I expect most people aren't shy about buying several weeks worth of meat and freezing it. Quality doesn't drop off that much. Quality differences are more noticeable with frozen vegetables, but I suspect a lot of people are fine with those too. Then there are frozen microwave/oven dinners and things like that, as well as non-perishable/shelf-stable items.

A household that exclusively cooks all their meals might make 7-10 grocery trips per month, but I expect that most people don't do that, and even those who cook all their meals probably don't rely on fresh meat & veggies for every single meal. And note that they don't cover people who go out to eat at restaurants at all in that list, so they're not accounted for anywhere.

On a side note, regarding your surprise at the purchases being large: most Americans, especially those who live in rural or suburban areas, don't do the kind of daily or near-daily stops at small convenience stores to pick up a few quick things that you see in dense cities. They drive to the grocery store, load up as much as they can fit in their cart, fill up their car, and go back home.

> Quality differences are more noticeable with frozen vegetables.

Heavily depends on the vegetables, frozen peas often taste way better than ones bought from the local market (not always but often) and come without the time taken to shell them, same with things like carrots etc.

The price difference is pretty insignificant when factored against the convenience (for me at least).

On the frozen meat point, I'd bet large sums of money people can't distinguish between fresh and frozen-within-3-or-so-months meat. In fact, frozen meat can be reliably made even tastier than fresh if you cook it straight fron the freezer with no thaw. It's a cool little hack really. By cooking from frozen you get more time to sear, char, and crisp the outside of the meat while the inside doesn't overcook. It's next to impossible to get the right mix of seared/charred outside but tender lightly cooked inside with the normal thickness stock cuts (~1inch) you get at grocery stores. With frozen, can do it no problem everytime. On that note, another trick, if you must cook without freezing, is to just get a custom thickness cut. For example, I need a 2-3inch NY strip if I want to grill straight from the refrigerator and get the right outside to inside done-ness.

Plenty of vegetables last 9+ days.

I shop once a week out of habit and because it's when I refill my car (I could shop every two weeks now that I've found fresh milk that has a very long expiration), except for meat and veg.

I go to a gigantic butcher's shop once or twice a month, portion out the purchases and then freeze them.

I get a veg delivery once a week from a local farm who also locally sources what they don't grow.

Maybe visits are split among couples? As the average age in this dataset is 32, a significant chunk of the people must be partnered or married.

When I was growing up my mother did one major shopping trip a month. And she cooked every meal for the family - we never ate out.

We ate a lot of frozen meats and vegetables. Even bread stays fresh if you freeze it.

I used to make shopping once a week. Since some food doesn't last very long I would plan my meals according to the kind of food. For example on the shopping day I would usually eat fresh fish. Some meat would go to refrigetator for short term consumption, some to the freezer to be used later. Fruit and vegetables are more tricky, since in my opinion the lose a lot if you freeze them. You can though try to get less ripened fruits, in order to consume them in later days.

In any case, according to what my American friends told me, in their case most probably it is because they don't buy much fresh food at all.

>> On average, customers go to physical grocery stores 3.2 times per month

> This seems crazy to me

It read to me as poor use of statistics (as in the statement that the average human has slightly more than one ovary and slightly less than one testicle). Some don't go at all and do no food prep, some are not primary shopper she in household but stop by occasionally on way home to fetch forgotten item, etc. Plus all surveyed order in!

My Mom used to buy groceries every two weeks.

You eat the perishable stuff the first week, and the less perishable stuff the second week. Strawberries on day 1, oranges on day 13. Fresh bread on day 4, homemade biscuits on day 12. String beans on day 6, cabbage on day 11.

One of the nice benefits is you really work through everything by the end of week 2, so you don't have random crap sitting in your fridge for a month.

Pizza and chinese restaurants are likely dominating the food delivery war in the US. They don't seem to be considered in this study.

In China there are a heap of last-mile delivery providers, but only two clear winners with national coverage: http://ele.me/ and http://waimai.meituan.com/ ... statistics of recent but nebulous origin claim Ele.me (Alibaba-backed) has 55% (42% + 13% after acquiring Baidu Waimai last month) and Meituan (Tencent backed) has 41% of the national market. (I would regard these figures suspiciously.)

Overall the finished meal delivery concept has proven very popular with Chinese consumers, probably because of growing working hours, smaller families/living situations and worsening traffic.

The government recently announced rules for the delivery sector's employees including no right to enter private premises, requirement to be punctual, requirement to be quiet and respectful, etc.

In terms of Asian regional providers, Food Panda has pretty good traction in a few countries and there are a number of smaller startups in most Southeast Asian markets, though none we are aware of with fundamentally unique models. Uber Eats and Deliveroo are trying to get in to some markets like Hong Kong.

I feel like Food Delivery is a place where competition may actually have driven up prices for the consumers. I was gone from SF for two years and when I came back to the same neighborhood, I felt that food delivery became more expensive because of DoorDash, etc.

Places that used to not charge delivery fees now do, maybe because now they realized they could? Or because they have to compete for delivery people. Also, some apps now charge a 20% default tip. It is not rare to get three types of fees on top on one delivery order, even for something simple as a burrito.

Don't forget the price markups! If you compare prices on Doordash or Yelp vs restaurants' websites you'll often find that the prices themself are 10-20% higher.

In the US can you not order food for delivery directly from supermarket, same for restaurants?

I would have thought in the UK Tesco, Sainsburys etc do as well as any delivery only services (Ocado, Amazon Fresh etc).

I would have guessed direct restaurant orders are as large as justeat/uber eats style services. They would certainly deserve a place on the pie chart...

I also dont believe the average US consumer spends $105/month on meal kits...

> In the US can you not order food for delivery directly from supermarket, same for restaurants?

I think it's available in larger, older cities (e.g. on the East Coast), but in the rest of the country it's a lot rarer. I think maybe it's much the same reason we no longer have bellboys, ushers or elevator attendants: minimum wage & payroll taxes rose to the point that it wasn't cost-effective for grocers or customers.

In the UK we have higher minimum wage, and higher petrol duties, and yet we manage to have extensive supermarket delivery.

And it's been happening for many years - the first "online" shopping from home happened in the UK, from Tesco, in 1984.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24091393

Just remember - if you don't want your data packed up and shipped off for marketing purposes, don't apply for a loan from Earnest :)

Seriously. It's one thing to conduct the analysis in-house and sell the results, it's another to just sell the data outright.

I don't think they sold it though. This is Priceonomics thing now -- companies pay them to write stories using the company's data as a more highbrow form of content marketing. I assume Earnest commissioned this vs them selling or giving away the data to Priceonomics.

The thing that leaps out at me is that People spend $134 when ordering online and $155 in-store. That simple stat shouts a huge amount about the changes coming. That's 15% revenue, and I expect it is almost entirely impulse purchases, much of which will be high fat high sugar content.

But losing 15% revenue is huge.

I also would ask where the joined up services are - I mean imagine we all shared some domestic services for our houses in a street.

Maid service, (vaguely) communal eating (certainly communal food prep), the same plumber and boiler services, the same x y z

I think that handing over that part of my life for someone else to think about is attractive. And it is not really on radar.

I just wonder if it is possible

Seeing various fast foods in America and what generally people eat , it looks like easy to cook especially the prep work is less. Still I am surprised to see why many ppl don't cook . It's so much fun, more than you get to eat healthy and save lots of money .

> Still I am surprised to see why many ppl don't cook

Many people don't know how to cook and I assume that a lot lack basic knowledge about what food is healthy too. I wonder why this isn't taught at school.

The data here seems highly suspect, every other analysis I've seen puts Uber eats at a much larger market share than 0.1% of the market.

I'm very skeptical of their data considering it doesn't include Peapod, the oldest and largest internet grocery delivery company.

If you take a look at the original blog post upon which this article is based, they list exactly which companies they include in each category:

https://www.earnest.com/blog/food-economy-spending-data/

"Brick-and-mortar includes Publix, Whole Foods, Kroger, Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Costco, and Albertsons. Grocery delivery includes Instacart, Fresh Direct, Foodkick, Amazon Fresh, and Thrive. Meal Kit services include Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, and Purple Carrot. Prepped meals include Freshly, Thistle, and Munchery. Restaurant delivery services include Ubereats, Doordash, Seamless, GrubHub, and Caviar."

Why isn't Postmates on the graph with DoorDash etc?

tl;dr = consumers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com