The Wall Street Journal reports that Deliveroo, a UK food delivery business that is backed by Amazon, has decided to open a pizza parlor in London’s Swiss Cottage neighborhood.
The restaurant, which will be called Pizza Paradise, reportedly will have "outdoor and indoor seating, a front-of-house pizza oven, a back-of-house kitchen and an interior waiting bench." The goal, the Journal writes, is to allow "Deliveroo staff to learn how to manage a restaurant that offers dine-in and delivery, working out how best to balance the needs of both types of diners at peak times," which will then allow the company to be more effective at serving the needs of its client businesses.
The story points out that Deliveroo and its clients have encountered familiar issues: "Helmet-clad drivers and cyclists form knots at restaurants as they wait to pick up orders, doors bang open and closed as they come and go, and kitchen staff scramble to keep up with parallel streams of orders from on-site diners and those at home." Deliveroo is trying to figure out new best practices to alleviate at least some of these problems.
The Journal writes that "Deliveroo has experience running food-service operations. The company in 2016 began opening Deliveroo Editions, locations known as 'dark kitchens' or 'ghost kitchens,' where multiple restaurant brands operate kitchens exclusively for delivery in one central space. It now operates nearly 300 such kitchens globally, in markets including the U.K., United Arab Emirates, France and Hong Kong."
But an eat-in restaurant would be a "novel concept for a technology business," the story says.
- KC's View:
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I think this is a really interesting idea, but my own bias would be that Deliveroo needs to have an appreciation for more than how to smoothly integrate a take-out component into a restaurant operation; for me, it would be just as important to serve really good pizza and whatever other dishes it happens to make.
It makes me crazy when businesses that are in the food business don't make food their highest priority, when they don't tap into the visceral, emotional, aspirational nature of food as a potential differential advantage.
