Best of Kent 2019

Winner: DoorDash

Since 2013, DoorDash has brought food directly to customers through its “Dashers.” Four Stanford students founded the service in Palo Alto, California. It currently serves customers in hundreds of cities. Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash, and a few of his friends noticed an inefficiency in the food delivery market when they saw local restaurants ignoring the delivery concept because they didn’t have the resources to fulfill orders. Their mission was to connect people to their favorite local restaurants. Considering they raised a round of funding that valued the company at $1.4 billion in 2018, it’s safe to say their mission is successful so far. According to fortune.com, DoorDash passed Uber Eats in 2018, and recently passed GrubHub in terms of market share, owning 27.6% of the market. Even as the company was beginning to grow, Xu was not concerned about being pushed aside by other big dining delivery players like Instacart, Postmates or Uber Eats. Dining is “the largest largest market I can think of,” Xu told USA Today in 2015. “We eat three times a day, seven days a week. As a result, I do think consumers want choice.”

Second: Uber Eats

Uber Eats, built off the name recognition and infrastructure of Uber in 2014, continues to be one of the biggest names in food delivery. In 2015, the service was released as a separate app and has amassed over 50 million downloads on the Google Play Store and delivers to hundreds of cities in several countries across the globe, expanding to Ireland, Egypt, Kenya, Ukraine, Romania and the Czech Republic, among others. A significant portion of the service’s growth is because of the company’s partnership with McDonald’s, delivering from thousands of locations, which meant McDonald’s accounted for about 9% of the available restaurants to order from as of March 2018, according to The Verge.

Third: Grubhub

First founded in 2005, Grubhub has grown to be one of the largest food delivery services in the country. According to its company statistics page, in 2018 it provided over $5 billion in food sales to local restaurants and more than $1 billion in tips to drivers. It also processes an average of 467,500 orders per day, serving about 17 million users. According to the Grubhub Wikipedia page, the Chicago-based company made over $1 billion in revenue in 2018.