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Comment by keymone | Hacker News Reader

has there ever been a delivery service that is food focused rather than food-vendor focused? i just want to order a good burrito, i don't care who makes it. or i'm having a party and we want to order a few burritos, couple pizzas and some sushi - we don't want to make separate orders for all of that. which vendor executed the order can be than rated and future vendors selected by rating and personal preferences.

is this even viable?

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Deliveroo has basically doing this kind of thing in the UK for a while. They operate "dark kitchens" (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/28/deliveroo-d...) which are industrial-zone food prep facilities combining a variety of different vendors on one site. There's still a brand associated with it and everything, which I would guess is actually quite important for customer comprehension.

As long as you can convince different restaurants to produce the same thing exactly sure it can work but thats rather a tall task.

Most people I know would select the place they want to get food from first since there is a huge variance in quality and personal tastes.

I don't think you need to convince them to produce the same thing. The delivery company would just have single preferred suppliers for each different kind of meal.

Curiously another post on the frontpage is about the success of Aldi, which has a similar model as a grocery store (very limited selection of good quality products). I could see the Aldi of meal delivery working.

Aldi isn’t a high quality grocery store it’s a discount supermarket it’s in house brands are god awful when compared to the likes of M&S and Waitrose.

Comparisons are irrelevant; Aldi products are of quality enough that a very large swathe of the population shop there, not just poor people.

Is that true though? I have seen Lidl/Aldi winning awards for the quality of their own brands over M&S and Waitrose before

Interestingly, I was only yesterday thinking about Deliverance[1]. They were a food delivery company in London that did just that — they cooked all of the meals and then delivered them, but they closed down a few years ago.

[1] https://twitter.com/deliverancefood

I remember these guys. It was one of the best ways to order food to the office that pleased everyone. It was comparatively good food vs its competitors back in the day.

i wonder why it's a billion dollar business now and not then. Is it mobile penetration allow low paid citizen to deliver ? But scooters have always existed..

As long as there is a sufficient quantity of people who have limited means of other income, and they can drive, it should be viable.

This reminds of a service named Sprig we had in SF. It closed down a couple years ago, however, after a short run.

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