GrubHub Archive

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.