The Food Deliveryman of Tomorrow Doesn’t Work for a Restaurant

GrubHub has spent a decade positioning itself as the perfect middleman. Hungry people use its service to connect with restaurants, and GrubHub gets a cut of the action without the headaches of delivery: a workforce that needs to be paid and gets into traffic accidents, door buzzers that don’t buzz, pizza that gets cold. Focusing on technology allowed the company to essentially win the online food-delivery market with the 2013 acquisition of it biggest competitor, Seamless, followed by an initial public offering.

Despite this profitable position outside the food-delivery fray—revenue has tripled since 2012, with 5 million active users who place an average of 203,000 orders per day—GrubHub has been hinting for years that its future would include actually delivering food. Last week the company made a big step toward taking its digital business into the physical world with the acquisition of two major delivery services, Restaurants on the Run and DiningIn. There’s an arms race afoot among tech companies trying to build delivery services, and GrubHub wasn’t about to get left behind.