The rise of food delivery apps
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How the growth in food delivery apps could change the restaurant industry forever. Manuela Saragosa speaks to Moe Tkacik from the American Economic Liberties Project about threat posed to restaurants by the dominance of platforms like DoorDash, Uber Eats and Deliveroo. Collin Wallace, former head of innovation at GrubHub, explains why these platforms continue to expand despite never making a profit. Food writer Jonathan Nunn discusses the breakdown of the relationship between customers and restaurants, and what that could mean for the future of the industry. And restaurateur Charlie Mellor tells us why his experience with delivery apps led him to set up his own rival platform.
(Photo: an Uber Eats delivery rider, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Zaragoza. In this edition, food delivery apps, |
| 0:09.4 | who hasn't used one in lockdown? After all, it's a way of keeping your local restaurant in business, |
| 0:14.8 | isn't it? So I don't think you could call them a lifeline to restaurants because they really have an |
| 0:19.8 | inherently predatory business model. |
| 0:22.5 | We're asking what food delivery apps are doing to food outlets. |
| 0:26.5 | The ones who suffer right now are the smaller restaurants that have a harder time adapting |
| 0:31.7 | to the technology. The reality is there's going to be a lot of restaurants that don't make |
| 0:36.3 | this transition. That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:43.2 | So here's something you might not know. |
| 0:46.0 | It's apparently really, really difficult to find good Italian pizza in Washington, D.C. |
| 0:51.6 | It is a pizza wasteland, Washington, D.C. is. There's some really, really, I've had the |
| 0:58.7 | worst pizza of my life in this, in this city. Yeah, it's, I'm sure that you could go to any |
| 1:04.6 | major city in China and get far superior pizza. |
| 1:09.1 | Mo Tassick there is a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project. |
| 1:13.8 | She knows about the lack of good pizza in Washington, D.C., because it's where she lives |
| 1:17.9 | with her husband, who's a chef. |
| 1:20.0 | When the pandemic and lockdowns hit, Mo and her husband figured they could keep his restaurant |
| 1:24.5 | going by making deliveries. |
| 1:26.5 | His restaurant, after all, makes good |
| 1:28.1 | Italian-style pizza. And there were enough food delivery apps to do the job for them, DoorDash, |
| 1:33.6 | Grubhub, Uber Eats. But Moe says these weren't as restaurant friendly as they first appeared. |
| 1:39.5 | He came home one day and said, oh my God, you'll never believe this. The delivery apps, you know, |
... |
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