The future for restaurants as 'platforms', Doordash results and will Wonder succeed where other ghost kitchens have not?

In this week's The Digital Restaurant podcast, we discuss the following key headlines, and here are some of our key quotes. To get the transcript of our podcast - head here.

Articles mentioned in the video:

1. DoorDash Releases Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Financial Results

Related Articles: Doordash Results & Uber and Uber Eats Driver Earnings

"I think they're basically taking money from the restaurants who are advertising on their platform and then reinvesting that money to spend on consumers to get them to order to order more frequently, to keep ordering and to acquire new customers. So in this way, the restaurants are really subsidizing DoorDash and Uber Eats to grow themselves and to keep themselves stable and to keep people ordering. " - Meredith

2. Focus rebrands as a 'platform' company following the hotel model

Related Article: Restaurant Business + Linked In Post

"The approach enables restaurant platforms to achieve the same level of customer loyalty, brand recognition, operational efficiency that allows hotel chains like Marriott & Hilton to dominate their markets" - Carl

3. American share of wallet on food is at its highest point for 30 years

Related Article: WSJ

"What we're going to see is that restaurants might actually price themselves in such a way that opens them up to a massive, massive disruption, whether that is groceraunt and semi-prepared food in the grocery, new forms of restaurant, like a vertically integrated delivery kitchen" - Meredith

4. Wonder beds in at Walmart

Related Articles: Inc.com, Hngry.tv, Vimeo

"Wonder says they offer six minute delivery windows, 95% on time rate, 27 minutes order to eat, and a nine and a half ouf of 10 customer satisfaction score.And they have a 50% reorder rate in 14 days and their AUV's for their first couple of locations were between $4 and $5 million with projections to more than double that" - Carl

5. Cartken teams up with UberEats in Tokyo

Related Article: Robotics and Automation news + TechCrunch

"What we've said about robot or drone delivery in the past, but in particular, the sidewalk robots is that you want to be places that have incredibly high labor costs. Check you want to be places that are incredibly dense. Check. And you want to have places that have relatively low regulation." - Meredith

Additional Articles

6. Toast lays off 10% of its workforce

7. Wingstop is bigging up its proprietary tech stack launch

8. Inspire Brands buys Vromo

9. Dining out is about to look a lot different

10. Time to market for digital products is 40% faster from build to market launch for digital champions than for legacy incumbents.

11. Is Domino's Decision to try 3rd party delivery paying off?

Canceling $600 orders!! Thankfully it had a happy ending.

64% of American consumers visit independents over national chains.

Wolt arrives in Luxembourg as 30th market for DoorDash acquired international player

Next week: Christine Schindler of PathSpot on making it easy for your employees to do the healthy thing

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The Year of Autonomous Delivery

Thanks to Joseph Szala, GSD, DCMJ, for his kind shout-out of the show

Carl at the ALFA Co. GM conference in Riyadh

and with one of MENA's most esteemed leaders - Talal El Khalil

Thank you, Karen “Koko” Tucker , for endorsing the podcast and our great guest, Anand Gala .