Research Outline

On-Demand Food Delivery Startups

Goals

To gain a list of on-demand food delivery startups in the US, especially focused on urban area delivery providers.

Early Findings

  • The major players in this field are DoorDash, Uber Eats, Postmates, GrubHub, Caviar and Amazon Restaurants.
  • Other examples include Delivery Hero, Delivery.com, Waitr, Bite Squad, Beyond Menu, EAT Club, Good Uncle, Eat Street and Order Ahead.
  • goPuff is nearly in this same market, but we have excluded it as it is targeted towards delivery pre-packaged snacks and items from a convenience store, not from restaurants.
  • We also assumed "food delivery" to be ready-to-eat already-prepared food, not groceries or meal kits.
  • Our strategy was first to look for pre-existing lists of US on-demand food delivery startups in the US. As Crunchbase no longer offers its listings for free, we were unable to pull together a comprehensive listing using this popular startups database. After exploring several other avenues for comprehensive lists, we then realized there were no up-to-date lists available in the public domain.
  • Therefore, we then combed through several listings located in the media and through business publications, eliminating those that are now defunct or were not relevant to already-prepared food delivery. We also utilized some other business listing directories, though not specialized in startups, like Craft.co and Owler.