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GrubHub Helps You Find Restaurant Delivery Options
When I lived in Manhattan, I ordered food delivery many times each week. Some places I called directly and some I used SeamlessWeb. Tonight I came across another food delivery service named GrubHub. The idea is simple: if you live in a city GrubHub covers (Boston, Chicago, New York and SF), you select a restaurant, select your food, enter your delivery details and payment info and the order is dispatched to the restaurant.
What’s interesting about GrubHub is that they list restaurants that both pay them and that don’t pay them. Most of the services I’ve seen to-date only display the establishments they have deals with. I like their about us page as well – it’s open and honest. Order from a restaurant with a seal on the page and GrubHub makes a cut on the sale; otherwise nothing.
The interface is well designed and I found searching to work fine. They are currently looking for a community manager via the jobs page.
What I don’t get is why they would expand into Seamless Web territory so early on. Why not own a city that SeamlessWeb isn’t in? There are plenty of other food delivery websites today and I think the key is to expand as you would in the game of Risk. Take the small countries (or cities in this case) and then go after the big locations. There are so many other cities where GrubHub would work across the U.S.
i ordered in the bay area and my first experience was awesome.
the food was delivered faster than Dominoes Pizza used to promise way back in the day…
good job grubhub!
Hi Allen, thanks for the write-up. We’re glad you like the service.
To respond to your questions, I think you said it yourself in the article: we do things a little bit differently than SeamlessWeb. They focus more on serving the corporate client for lunch; we focus more on serving the individual/couple at home for dinner. They display restaurants they have relationships with and do strictly online ordering. We show all the restaurants in the area and allow for many different ordering options. So the fact that New York is their home market didn’t really factor into our expansion plans at all.
We felt NYC was a city we had to enter sooner rather than later because delivery is so prevalent; it’s more so a part of the local food culture than in any other city. Our mission is to make delivery better, and we thought it would be kind of silly to avoid New York where delivery is such a strong part of the city’s culture. Our expansion has actually been highly tied to the metric of percentage of restaurants that offer delivery. New York is #1 on that list, so I definitely think there’s room for two (or even more) players in this space. That said, we think SeamlessWeb focuses on only certain parts of New York that fit their model best (Midtown and Financial District, notably), so we’re trying to open up some of the more residential areas to the joys of ordering delivery online.
It’s an interesting analogy you’ve made to the “Risk” strategy of expansion. Since we organize delivery information ourselves, launching a market is a large effort no matter the size of the city, which means at such a nascent stage of our company, we can’t capture the small cities and then expand to the larger ones. We have to expand into larger areas to justify the effort of launching a market. So we’ve so far stuck to fairly large cities. And we’re launching Philadelphia in March so that trend is continuing. We’re glad to hear that you think our model will work in other cities. We certainly agree and are planning on launching a few more markets this year.
Additionally to my colleague’s at GrubHub’s response, I’d like to comment on the Risk analogy in particular. While it’s true that the initial stages of the game is a land grab, its also important not to let one of your opponents get the benefits of a monopoly. You might, say, want to hold on to Ukraine so that your opponent can’t have all of Europe. And, as Kramer discovered, “Ukraine is not weak!”
For delivery in the bay area eat24hours.com is my favorite.