What is it about the pizza business that lets it thrive with delivery, while so many of these food delivery startups struggle?
Pizza dough is just flour. yeast and water. All of which cost pennies. Sauce is slightly more expensive, but you can make something which tastes pretty close to fresh with some canned tomatoes and spices which also cost pennies. Cheese is cheap, there's no need to use fresh expensive mozzarella when you're blasting it in the oven anyway, the low quality pre-grated stuff will turn out pretty good too. Toppings are usually fairly low quality, which again doesn't really matter when they're scattered on a pizza.
When I make it at home it usually costs me about £3, and that's indulging myself with better quality ingredients like fresh mozzarella and tomatoes. Delivery places can get it down to £1, including toppings, and sell it on for £10. The staff are all on minimum wage, you don't need much space if you don't have seating, and at least where I live in London 9/10 delivery drivers use mopeds which are cheap to run.
Compare that to Munchery, where looking at the site they're offering fresh vegetables and cuts of meat for probably similar prices to pizza and you can see where the problem lies. That and being based in SF I have no doubt they've gone full Silicon Valley with their offices (communal spaces, very high sq/ft per employee, high wages etc) and it becomes clear why their business model is probably not sustainable.
Which means this isn't a persuasive answer to the question 'tzs asked. Lots of restaurants have low food cost. And pizza restaurants aren't the most efficient category of restaurant. Why don't the even-more-efficient kinds of restaurants deliver too, if pizza's food cost sets some kind of frontier for viable delivery?
I think factors other than food cost are at play.
If you want a crappy pizza, then yes, you can cut on quality. A good mozzarella can make the difference.
Of course you need also the other ingredients to be of good quality (and prepared in the right way): if the bread feels and tastes like cardboard there is no point in spending money on mozzarella.
None of these places do much to prove their pizza dough.
In my experience, it's the other way around until SV. Very high employee / sqft
-pizza is still good when it's merely warm (whereas pasta/chicken aren't)
-pizza doesn't come in individual servings (you don't order $2.50 slices. pizza delivery has effective $10+ order minimums)
-margins on pizza are huge (it's literally just a cheese sandwich. the cost of a large domino's pizza is <$2.50 iirc; margins on fancier food are not as high)
I don't know the LA market if you take New York, there is already an extremely efficient low-cost food delivery market where the vast majority of restaurants do take-out and various ordering services (seamless etc) are available and very frequently used. It's going to be extremely difficult to get good market penetration with unit economics that allow for a profitable business in the long term.
A lot of people focus purely on an improved user experience (eg the magic of uber where you click and a car comes, and you just get out without paying at the end) but "disruption" of the established UX isn't enough - you need to provide goods and services at a price point where there is demand and yet somehow you still make enough to stay in business.
Blue Apron spends about a million dollars on marketing. Every 2 days. I am using them as an example because they're publicly traded and so that number is conveniently available; I don't believe them to be grossly out of line with the other delivery startups.
(To be fair to the startups: they're attempting to change a core cultural ritual! That's not a quick or easy sell.)