Unbundling the Food Experience
tl;dr: on the potential long-term impacts of food delivery services.
It’s probably not really news to you, but the food delivery market has blown up.?In my recent travels to Bulgaria, Rome, and London, I couldn’t help but notice and wonder about the number of both services (Just Eat, Deliveroo, UberEats, Takeaway, etc.) and the total number of bike/scooter delivery people working for them.
The obvious conclusion is that Covid is the catalyst for this and it probably is, though GrubHub and Seamless have been in this business for a while.
What I wonder about is what the long-term impacts of this change means.
One, of course, is that there are fewer restaurants that can survive, which affects a type of employment as well as things like retail rent space.
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I am curious, however, how it changes the way that we relate to other people.?On the one hand, it may be that we eat alone more often and we miss out on some of the social experiences of doing so.?Simultaneously, it reduces the number of times that we see other people being relaxed as opposed to other places like public transport, airports, hospitals, and places where people are stressed.
That being said, when I did go out to restaurants in some of the cities, they were, often times, full and lively.?Perhaps the communal eating experience is so deep in our brains that this is an industry which is a bit more resitant.
I guess my assumption is that, like we’ve seen so many other industries get massively disrupted by the arrival of network and mobile technologies, there’s bound to be a long-term major disruption to the “food experience.”?I don’t think it’s not fair to say that Covid accelerated the change because, to me, at least, it wasn’t clear what the change was going to be (as opposed to say, work from home).
However, I do think it is fair to say that Covid was a massive exogenous shock to the restaurant system (no kidding, right?) and in a decade or so, we’ll look back and think it was all inevitable.
My only question is: what is it that we will think was inevitable about the way the food experience was altered?