Danny Meyer is Backing a Food Delivery App that will Shake Up The System

 

Danny Meyer is backing a new kind of food delivery app. It’s currently called Olo, and right now it’s a software that restaurants can buy (current subscribers include the now very out of vogue Chipotle, Five Guys, and Jamba Juice) to power their online ordering systems. The company just raised $40 million, and soon, the software  will become Dispatch,  an app that will aim to be the “Kayak.com for delivery,” founder and CEO Noah Glass, told TechCrunch.

The way it works is this: You decide what you want to eat, and the app will scour different delivery services including Postmates and Uber, and will find you a driver who can get your food to you the cheapest and quickest.

This is an excellent idea in theory, but at this point I’m not sure I’d download it (I will probably eat my words in a few months). A quick scroll through my phone showed me that out of the 64 apps on my phone (including the ones the phone came with that I can’t delete), I use less than a third. A 2014 Nielsen study showed that while we’re using our phones a lot, and new apps are coming out all the time, people use, on average, fewer than two dozen apps per month (this Tech Crunch article is a good explainer). Once I download Dispatch, it will likely find a place somewhere near Apple Maps and the Watch app (I don’t have a watch, please let me delete this).

While Dispatch aims to simplify my life, right now it feels like it would make it more complicated. I want fewer decisions in my life, not more. I don’t want to see every possible delivery option and weigh the pros and cons (this guy will come in 15 minutes, but the other will give me 15% off). Just bring me pizza!

Based on the funding and the names behind it, (Meyer, and The Raine Group) it will probably be a polished, well-executed app. But, we’ll have to see whether people are fed up enough with the current system to use it.

Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com

Filed Under: