Online Food Delivery 2.0

from the let's-try-that-again dept

Thu, Dec 26th 2002 10:15am — Mike Masnick

I still hear people lamenting the disappearance of Kozmo and Webvan. While everyone admits they were stupid business plans, they sure did enjoy getting food delivered. Of course... when there are customers who enjoy a service, there are always new companies willing to come along, saying they've learned from the mistakes of the original failures. Last month we had a story about a new online grocery service in New York that was taking a more cautious approach (though, it had some parallels to Webvan). Now, Wired News has a story about some other NYC-based attempts to offer food delivery oline. They're trying to do it differently than the Kozmos of the world, by simply aggregating restaurants, putting all their menus up, and letting the restaurants handle the delivery themselves (and taking a tiny piece off each transaction). It's no surprise that these are all starting in New York City, which has the density required to make such a venture more likely to succeed. It will be interesting to see if they actually succeed, though, I know there have been a bunch of similar services focusing on restraurant delivery that have been around for a while. It is good to see stories of new companies trying to offer services that people like (what a concept, right?). It's also good to see these stories actually focus on what the service is and why people like it, rather than on how much money the company has raised and the completely unrelated background of the founders.

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COD, 26 Dec 2002 @ 10:43am

No Subject Given
Grocery delivery is not a new idea. If anything - driving to some megacenter is the new idea. I remember my parents getting the milk delivered as recently as the 70's, and The Brady Bunch always had their groceries delivered :) I think the main problem is that there are so many more choices in the grocery store today that it makes the task much more complicated than it was 30 years ago.
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- Mike (profile), 26 Dec 2002 @ 10:47am
  
  Re: No Subject Given
  True. In fact, there are still places that do milk delivery.
  
  The big difference between things like that, though, are that they're "route" businesses, and not order-and-deliver businesses. There are plenty more economies of scale in a route business, where the same (or similar) products get delivered each week on a route that the driver can follow along.
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