Marketplace®

Daily business news and economic stories

Dispatch, Ep 14: It’s a meal delivery apocalypse

Have we reached peak food delivery apps?

A meal option prepared from Blue Apron ingredients.
A meal option prepared from Blue Apron ingredients.
Tony Wagner/Marketplace

Oh you need some food to come to your house? I think there’s an app for that.

In fact, here is what’s probably a partial list of the various food and meal delivery services operating in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Gobble
Chef’d
Munchery
Sprig
Postmates
DoorDash
Grub Hub
Caviar
Eat24
Uber Eats
Amazon Prime Now
Marley Spoon
Blue Apron
Power Supply
Urban Eats
Farmbox
Good Eggs
Thistle
Home Chef
Hello Fresh
Freshly

Think there’s a bubble there? Sure, they all offer something slightly different–delivery from restaurants vs in-house chefs, meal kits that are either organic or fast or gourmet or pre-prepared to some degree. New entrants are trying to come in all the time. But in this week’s Dispatch, I argue that the fundamentals that make these businesses so hard to grow might also mean that as they grow, they get less satisfying.

Have a listen and please subscribe! You can follow Dispatch more closely by creating a Soundcloud playlist  right here. Or you can also add our feed to your podcast player. In Podcasts on iOS, click the plus sign and paste in this link: — it’s a similar process for almost every other podcatcher app.

Related Topics