The combo deal of smartphones and restaurant delivery apps is a match made like peanut butter and jelly for people who just want good food to show up quickly. But sometimes it’s actually easier (and cheaper) to just go pick up the same meal instead.
Caviar, the restaurant delivery service owned by digital payments company Square, is adding that option after the acquisition of OrderAhead’s pickup business and an initial trial period over the last several weeks. A Square spokesperson declined to comment on the terms of the OrderAhead deal, citing company policy.
Dubbed Caviar Pickup, customers can order from the same app or the website as before, and then skip the line when picking up meals. Caviar says there is no extra fee for this, and that customers pay only for the cost of the items they order along with standard sales tax. Caviar offers free delivery promotions from time to time (usually with a promo code a minimum order amount requirement), and restaurants offer varying rates for delivery based on time and distance.
A Square spokesperson explains to Coins2Day that restaurants partner with Caviar to offer the pickup option just as the same for delivery, but that they don’t disclose the terms of these partnerships.
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Square acquired the self-described premium delivery service, which itself launched in 2012, in August 2014. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but estimates at the time pegged the deal to be worth approximately $90 million.
Since then, the restaurant-delivery-via-app business model has become a stuffed market with a new option seemingly popping up on smartphones (and subway ads) all the time. GrubHub, which also owns Seamless, (GRUB) is still one of the big fish. There is also Yelp’s Eat24 (YELP) and DoorDash as well as some still-hyperlocal efforts like Momofuku Chef David Chang’s Ando (Chang is also an investor in Maple), and Uber has dabbled in the space with UberEATS. Postmates offers the promise of delivering much more than just a hamburger and fries from a local eatery—positioning itself more as an alternative to grocery delivery service Instacart and possibly even TaskRabbit—but it still competes aggressively with all of the aforementioned options.
Accessible via iOS and Android apps as well as through a desktop browser, Caviar has partnerships with more than 3,000 restaurants in nearly a dozen markets: New York City (Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens), Washington D.C., Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area (including the East Bay & Marin), Portland, Ore., and Seattle.
The pickup option, however, will not be available in all of these areas initially. The new Pickup feature is first launching in the Bay Area (San Francisco and the East Bay), Los Angeles, and Portland with the promise of expanding to all markets “soon.” Square tells Coins2Day that it will be available in New York this spring.