DoorDash is expanding its on-demand delivery delivery with the launch of groceries, starting with select chains in markets throughout California and parts of the Midwest. The move follows DoorDash’s push into convenience stores earlier this year and its recently announced DashMart virtual store for selling snacks and other food items and for sale.
For now, DoorDash only works with Smart & Final, Meijer, Fresh Thyme and Hy-Vee, with Smart & Final only California customers in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County, Sacremento and San Diego. Customers in Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee will have access to Meiher and Fresh Thyme, with support for Hy-Vee stores arriving at a later date.
Key to DoorDash’s message delivery ambition is its backend delivery platform, called DoorDash Drive, which it sells to existing chains (including huge toy players such as Walmart) to help deliver power to its own delivery systems, such as the promise of it company of delivery windows as short as its standard food for order.
DoorDash Drive lets chain restaurants and supermarket stores create their own delivery systems (and throw their brand name on them), and the company says it uses the same underlying technology to deliver large inventories of supermarkets for the big app. That same platform is how chains like Wegmans can offer ancillary meals and other prepared foods, both through the main DoorDash app, where the store is treated like any other restaurant, and through its own Wegmans2Go app that consists of the standard of chain delivery, which in most markets is in fact already driven by Instacart.
DoorDash also wants customers to think of these orders as takeout instead of standard delivery of Amazon Fresh and Instacart style that typically happens in scheduled time windows. (Amazon, Instacart, Target, and others have experimented with fast same-day delivery and even one-hour delivery, but it remains limited and restricted to what brand you are in and in which store you shop.)
“We know that shopping can feel like a chore, which is why shopping on DoorDash will be available on an on-demand basis – which means no plans, no queues, no waiting,” the company wrote in a blog post . “More than 10,000 groceries, from dairy and eggs to local produce to fresh meat and fish, will be available in less than an hour from participating groceries.”
DoorDash can do this through a distinctive model that it is set up with its partner stores. The company’s contract drivers will not do the shopping for individual orders, as most Instacart shoppers do. Instead, the company works with a third-party company that will hire part-time and full-time employees to work at the store, pick up items for orders and prepare them for preparation. (Instacart has a similar model in some locations in the US, but the primary way the platform organizes shopping is for the people who deliver the orders to do the shopping as well.) In this way, DoorDash can promise short delivery windows similarly with takeout from a restaurant when ordering groceries is small enough.
To help get the new service off the ground, DoorDash even registers delivery of groceries in its DashPass subscription service, which means those who pay the $ 9.99 monthly fee can get free delivery. “So whether you are shopping for a week for groceries for your family or just need a few ingredients to perfect your next meal, we are here to meet any of your grocery needs easily and affordably in partnership with our groceries,” says the blog post explains.
DoorDash is already the leading food delivery platform in the US, beating GrubHub and UberEats, mostly due to its large footprint across the country and the number of restaurants and other stores it brought to the platform. And by adding convenience stores and now traditional groceries, the company could be well on its way to becoming the de facto American on-demand delivery app.
