World trend in Foodtech – Food delivery
In a previous article we introduced the theme of foodtech (https://www.completefood.it/en/world-trend-foodtech/), giving a brief summary of the main areas in which the most innovative food companies in the world they are working.
We are talking here about an area that is certainly not well known, but very important in the world of innovation in the food sector, that of the so-called “Food Delivery“.
The idea behind food delivery startups is to allow people to order the food they want from home, to get it ready for consumption quickly and at low cost. This should reduce the number of people leaving home only to take food ready from some place, perhaps by car, saving on the quality of life of larger cities, thanks to less traffic and pollution.
In recent years, some of the world’s most funded startups have always belonged to this category. Many of them, however, are in fact failed. Think of a name like Muchery, who had raised over $ 125 million, but was forced to close down (https://www.munchery.com/). A similar story has been experienced by companies like Spring, Maple and many others, almost all in the United States.
The reason? Hard to say in a few lines. Analysts consider one of the causes the difficulty of having to compete on the one hand with the logistics giants who want to master the food delivery market (Amazon above all), on the other with the many restaurants equipped with food delivery. In the eyes of consumers, the convenience of receiving ready-to-eat foods at home is not matched by the desire to pay a sufficient surcharge for the service, considering the high costs to be incurred for home delivery of food. The various startups have been forced to increasingly decrease the price of the service, to unsustainable levels for the survival of the company. A deeper understanding of the subject can be read here: https://digiday.com/retail/prepared-food-delivery-startups-failing/
As often happens, however, in innovation trends, when a market seems to disappear, a new technological innovation is able to give new life and new perspectives. This is what is happening to food delivery startups thanks to new technologies of autonomous drones. And it is here where successful startups in this sector are concentrated: companies with great engineering skills able to build hardware and software to create drones capable of delivering food at home. These drones will allow a great reduction in costs, making startups that deal with home delivery services sustainable again.
An example of a cutting-edge startup was Dispatch, which is said to have been acquired by Amazon for the construction of the next Amazon home delivery drone. But nothing has ever been officially confirmed in this regard (https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/07/meet-the-tiny-startup-that-helped-build-amazons-scout-robot/). The company that more than any other is at the forefront on the subject was born in Estonia and is called Startship: https://www.starship.xyz/business/. It is a reality that is working on a product that the experts consider the non plus ultra of the sector … we’ll see!
In Italy, unfortunately, as in almost all the major trends of food innovation, there is almost nothing.
There is always the exception: surely the very Italian Hotbox (https://hotboxfood.it/en/home-en-2/) deserves to be mentioned in this section. Take a look at their innovative pizza delivery product at home, and if you have a pizzeria try it for free! We have tested it in an event as a consumer. We assure you that Hotbox works very well: the pizzas transported with Hotbox were very good even after a very long time since they had been baked. We wish good luck to the young and friendly founders of Hotbox!
