Pizza Today - January 2017 - 3

commentary

with JEREMY WHITE

Who's Delivering Your Next Pizza?

reative Director Rick Daugherty and I were in
the beautiful city of New Orleans for a couple
of days visiting pizzerias. After a quick stop for
a requisite Po' Boy, we summoned an Uber to get us from
one pizza shop interview to the next. The driver conversed
with us about a number of things en route, but he became
visibly and audibly animated when the subject of Uber Eats
popped up.
"Oh man, you got that where you live yet?" he asked. "I
hope so. If not, y'all gotta look into it. It's fire, man."
Fire, wow. That's high hipster praise. Rick and I
exchanged knowing glances.
"We should do a story on that," Rick quipped. I chuckled because not only had we taken a look at third-party
delivery many years ago, but we were set to revisit it now
thanks to the oncoming explosion of options such as the
aforementioned Uber Eats.
"I love it," our driver continued. "I just get a notification
telling me what restaurant to pick up at and what address
to deliver it to. I just park outside the restaurant, walk in
and pick up the order."
I asked him if his company required any food-handling
and safety training.
"Nope," he said. "We don't touch the food or nothing
like that. It's already packaged up and ready to go when
we pick it up. We just put it in these bags (he showed me
a heat-retaining delivery bag he kept in his vehicle) and
deliver them. Nothing to it. It's great."
Rick asked about the demand for the service.

"Are you kidding me?" he asked. "It's New Orleans.
We're a food town, man. It's gonna get big here. Real big."
A year ago, in our February 2016 issue, Tony Gemignani
asked this question in his Respecting the Craft column: "Is
third-party delivery the way to go?" He called it the "future
for pizza delivery" and predicted that one day "our industry
will not have delivery drivers who are directly employed by
our restaurants."
Tony, who has utilized third-party delivery companies,
says there are still kinks in the system that need worked
out. But his experience tells him that the gains have been
massive since the early days. And he sees no reason why
that trend won't continue until we see third-party delivery
take over nationwide on a large scale.
Is it right for your pizzeria right now? Is it, as my Uber
driver in New Orleans suggested, "fire"? Are there benefits
to jumping into the fray early, or would your restaurant be
better served by waiting a while?
These are questions only you can answer based on your
intimate knowledge of your customers and your respective
market. If this is all new to you, Denise Greer's article on
page 30 will get your (delivery) wheels turning.
Best,

JEREMY WHITE
EDITOR IN CHIEF

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Pizza Today - January 2017

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