On demand food delivery has several major problems that were all very predictable
1) you can't predict how much food to make. On demand food companies were throwing away 30% of the food they made every night
drivers cost ~$25 an hour, and only do ~6 drop offs.
2) lots of idle driver time
3) routes can't be optimized (or only minor optimizations in real-time)
4) on average they are only dropping off 1.3 meals per delivery, making each meal very expensive to deliver
I helped start http://Thistle.co (only in California) to fix these problems; people order their meals for the week (doesn't work for everyone obviously) and we drop off 3x/week, with optimal routes and many more meals per dropoff. The company has been really capital efficient in doing so, hardly raising any money but doing 10s of millions in revenues.
1) you can't predict how much food to make. On demand food companies were throwing away 30% of the food they made every night
drivers cost ~$25 an hour, and only do ~6 drop offs.
2) lots of idle driver time
3) routes can't be optimized (or only minor optimizations in real-time)
4) on average they are only dropping off 1.3 meals per delivery, making each meal very expensive to deliver
I helped start http://Thistle.co (only in California) to fix these problems; people order their meals for the week (doesn't work for everyone obviously) and we drop off 3x/week, with optimal routes and many more meals per dropoff. The company has been really capital efficient in doing so, hardly raising any money but doing 10s of millions in revenues.