Home What's Brewing? Burp! Is Seattle in a Food Delivery Bubble?

Burp! Is Seattle in a Food Delivery Bubble?

foodserveWe’re not complaining — salivating is more like it — but not since local fishmongers began throwing Northwest salmon through the air at Pike Place Market has good food travelled faster in the Emerald City.

There are now – count ‘em – not just one, or three, or nine, but twelve different food delivery services shuttling tasty meals from Seattle’s favorite eateries to offices, dorm rooms and front porch stoops across Pugetopolis.

Our compliments go out to the chefs — and the drivers— but investors’ eyeballs seem to be bigger than their stomachs. With the quiet gurgles of an Internet bubble beginning to surface, the astronomical number of gastronomical choices seems a smidgen too overcooked, even for Seattle’s famous foodies.

Want great restaurant food fast? Here’s your carte du jour:

Peach

Lish

Munchery

Caviar

Postmates

Seamless

GrubHub

Eat24

Bitesquad

Amazon PrimeFood

DoorDash

— and this week UberEATS adds its wheels to the list promising “great food at the speed of Uber” from local restaurants to your front door in ten minutes or less.

UberEATS is fast because it holds a supply of pre-cooked meals in heated containers inside some vehicles. At the moment, the service is only available for lunches between 11am and 2pm in six neighborhoods: Downtown, Pioneer Square, Belltown, Lower Queen Anne, South Lake Union and Capitol Hill.

Skepticism about the ultimate success of too many food delivery services revolves around these questions:

Will delivery and transportation entities like AmazonPrime and Uber own a decisive advantage in speed and mileage since they’re already mobilized for other services?

Since restaurants want to build direct relationships with their patrons, why use a third party and not deliver the food themselves?

Peach CEO Nishant Singh told Seattle-based GeekWire that he wasn’t surprised Uber rolled out its food service in Seattle.

“Peach partner restaurants have skin in the game — they own the end-to-end process starting from preparing the food all the way to delivering it straight to the office reception desk,” Singh said when asked how Peach will compete. “So no matter on how many players enter the market with their delivery drivers, our quality of service will be superior.”

According to Geekwire, San Francisco-based SpoonRocket, who raised nearly $14 million and launched a lunch delivery service earlier this year in Seattle but shut down four months later, had planned to make a strong comeback this Fall.

Postmates, another service which requires drivers to carry pre-made food, has introduced an UberEATS-like service called Pop that “brings meals to customers in 15 minutes or less.”

We remain appetizingly peckish that such a grand buffet of restaurant delivery options in Seattle suffers from neither market saturation or consumer indigestion. Bon appetit! [24×7]