These are autonomous sidewalk robots from Cartken:

And last week, Uber announced that customers in Miami would start to see some of their food and grocery orders being delivered by them. The way it works is pretty simple. The app tells you when you need to meet your robot on the sidewalk (they apparently don't do elevators). You open their secure compartment through your phone (or a code?). And then there's your food! Next year, both companies intend to roll out this service across more of Miami-Dade and in other cities.

This isn't the first sidewalk robot in existence. I've seen a handful of ones here in Toronto. But if it works, this could be a pretty meaningful partnership. Uber used to do self-driving autonomy in-house, and it was always positioned as central to the company's future. Uber ended up selling off that part of its business in 2020 in order to raise cash and because autonomy started feeling a lot more difficult than probably most people expected. But what seems clear is that automation remains an important objective for the company. And for good reason.

I would imagine that, for some people, it's going to feel weird seeing fleets of sidewalk robots roaming around our cities with shawarma wraps and burritos. But one of the things that services like Uber Eats have taught us is that a lot of people are willing to pay a premium for extreme convenience. So if these robots can add to that convenience and also make fulfillment a little cheaper, I suspect that people will quickly get over the weirdness.

Supposedly on-demand shawarma is also good for communities:

“We are excited about how this partnership with Uber will bring the advantages of robotics to food delivery—and ultimately create more connected communities,” said Christian Bersch, Co-founder and CEO at Cartken. “Together, we have the opportunity to reduce traffic congestion, help local merchants to increase delivery capacity, and bring consumers fast, convenient, and emission-free deliveries.”

Despite having somewhere around 4,000 employees and being valued at upwards of $15 billion (2021 figure), CloudKitchens remains an incredibly secretive company. In 2020, it was reported that they had spent over $130 million in the preceding two years on properties in about two dozen cities, and this week the Financial Times reported that they have been quietly building "dark kitchens" across Latin America, alongside a new food and convenience goods business called Pik N' Pak.

The way this all supposedly works is that the "dark kitchens" prepare the food for delivery and pick-up takeaway, and any excess space within these buildings is used to store convenience goods like over-the-counter medicines and pet foods. I guess it is literally about picking and packing various items that you can then attach to takeout orders. In both cases, the food and goods are delivered to customers using local app companies such as Uber Eats.

All of this appears to represent a shift in the supply chain for takeout food and various convenience goods. But what I am really curious about right now is what the real estate footprint of this network looks like within our cities. What is the optimal square footage of a ghost kitchen? What radius do they serve? And how does this ultimately change the landscape of our cities? I don't know the answers to these questions, but change appears to be underway. Here's an excerpt from the above FT article:

"...the growth of dark kitchens across Latin America has caused controversy in certain cities. The proliferation in São Paulo, the largest city in the Americas, sparked objections from residents living nearby, with banners against new facilities appearing in well-heeled neighbourhoods. The town hall has proposed local regulation of dark kitchens and earlier this year placed a temporary ban on the issue of new licences. People have complained about noise, smells, smoke and motorcycle drivers — known colloquially as motoboys — waiting outside to collect orders. One unhappy local said his son had been nicknamed “bacon” and bullied in school because of the odour on his clothes, according to Cris Monteiro, a city councilwoman."

Travis Kalanick seems to have a knack for upsetting people and changing the way our cities operate. Although, the same could be said about a lot of other startups.

Here is another article/report thing from McKinsey talking about the "fast-growing food-delivery ecosystem." In the US, the top food-delivery players are DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub (in this order).

What is clear is that these platforms are growing very quickly and that COVID-19 was of course great for the business of eating at home. The demand is there.

But what is also clear is that food-delivery is a low-margin business that depends on scale. Last-mile and single-point delivery is tough. This is despite the fact that consumers have shown to be willing to pay a fairly significant premium in exchange for the conveniences of on-demand meals.

Here's a chart from McKinsey that looks at the unit economics of delivery apps:

It is a race to capture "stomach share."

But surely this evolves and gets further optimized with the continued rise of things like "ghost kitchens" and maybe autonomous delivery robots.

I remember driving home one night during the thick of the pandemic and placing an order on Uber Eats for pickup. When I arrived, I found a small food truck and one lonely guy in the middle of an empty (and wintery) parking lot on Lake Shore East. He handed me my poke bowls and I was on my way.

This is what is happening behind our apps and it's changing the way we eat.