GrubHub Now Also Wants To Deliver Food To Your Door

Online food delivery services like GrubHub are just storefronts that allow users to easily choose from an array of eateries, with the delivery of your food left up to the restaurants while GrubHub gets a commission. But GrubHub is now testing out a new format where it is actually the one bringing the food to your door.

Fortune reports that GrubHub has been offering delivery services to restaurants on a test basis in three cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago). It charges eateries about the same 14% commission that the service gets for orders placed online.

According to Fortune, that’s lower than the 20-30% charged by delivery services restaurants can use to handle deliveries instead of hiring employees.

Speaking of which, GrubHub has just announced that is acquiring two such delivery companies — DiningIn and Restaurants on the Run, which means GrubHub will be handling deliveries for around 3,000 restaurants in about a dozen markets around the country after those two deals are done.

If GrubHub expands beyond just restaurants and into the supermarket and convenience store delivery business, it will be in direct competition with companies like Peapod, Instacart, Amazon Fresh, Google, and Square, which recently acquired restaurant delivery business Caviar.

[via Eater]

by Chris Morran via Consumerist