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Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps we’ll look back and say “food delivery was the pet food of the 2020 startup boom/bust.”

I think these businesses are awful and probably unethical, but from the outside it would surprise me if a single winner could not make this business model work, once they had so much of the market that delivery schedules could reach high utilisation.

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The issue is mostly limited by requirements to get food there quickly.

If we knew what we wanted ahead of time, scheduling delivery ahead of time would make it easy... since you could use a delivery route (to deliver 2-3 items nearby).

A single winner may be able to make it work since you can do 1-2 pickups and deliver to two nearby homes.

Uber Eats has done this to me and it made me stopped using them.

Driver needs to wait for the second meal to be prepared, pack it together, take a detour to the other place and spend time delivering it.

So your meal arrives late, cold, and crushed after you paid full-price for the delivery.

> Driver needs to wait for the second meal to be prepared,

That's the rub right there.

If you're the winner in the market, can send info to a restaurant to keep your food hot (or even hotter than normal) and can schedule it perfectly it will work.

Once you spend a couple of billions into the infrastructure to make it happen, you can totally make a couple of hundred thousands worth of profit - 2020 Startups.

>send info to a restaurant to keep your food hot

I'm not sure what exactly you think restaurants can do with that request. A small subset of places will have a heat lamp, but that still doesn't really preserve quality, just heat.

"This food will be ready to collect at 17:35 and 45 seconds, and if it isn't, we wont be paying you".

Restaurants would soon figure out how to use a couple of timers to get every order done on time.

There could also be a deeper integration to ensure that, for example, there are no more than 3 orders worth of fries being cooked at once, or no more than 2 pickups per minute scheduled, to avoid overloading that part of the kitchen.

Have you ever worked in a restaurant? What you're describing would be a massive undertaking to manage with just a single corporate partner, much less with a collection of independent and small chain restaurants.

Once you own the delivery space, you can crush restaurants into submission just like the darlings of the tech space have done: Apple, Google, Amazon.

If you force restaurants to optimize everything for timing, you'll end up delivering food on par with McDonalds.

And if it turns out customers are willing to pay restaurant prices for McDonalds quality delivery, then McDonalds themselves will start a delivery service to compete with you.

Let's just say that such places could never count me in as a customer.

The quality of the food delivered is dubious, to put it mildly, just by the very description of the process.

Yep, I recently stopped using Doordash for this reason exactly.

My driver picked up my meal (from about 10 blocks away), then proceeded to drive downtown to pick up another meal, then to the other side of town to deliver it, then finally back to me.

My food arrived almost 2 hours after I ordered it, cold, soggy, and leaking in the bag.

Yeah, that's why the churn of food-delivery companies isn't going to end unless external factors cut off the flow of investment. It's conceivable that one winner could be massively profitable, at enormous scale, with all the efficiencies of a significant proportion of the population being bought-in and everything from schedules to menus to delivery vehicles optimised to make the service effective. (Here is your daily PrimeMeal, valued PrimeCitizen). Until then everyone is making huge losses with ad-hoc restaurant collection.

Doesn't really sound like good food, though, if that's something you're interested in.

Huh. Interesting! How about a food truck with a kitchen that drives a pre-defined route to delivers pre-ordered food?

At that point you're not a food delivery service, you're a restaurant that only offers delivery.

I don't think that could be made to work for impulse, on-demand ordering ("I've just decided I want food as soon as possible, and my stomach/brain seems to think $dish sounds good"), which in my experience is the bulk of it. People don't plan out what they're going to eat when ordering restaurant food as much, they just do it when they're ready.

Unfortunately you can't cook while a food truck is moving.

It's not illegal, just difficult (don't ask how I know)

Without the cooking part, Sprig was doing this back in 2014. Delivery staff drives around a neighborhood with a bunch of hot meals.

Sprig only offered 2-3 dishes.

Sprig went out of business.

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