There will be a revolution in food delivery
This spring, Toronto office workers received a lunchtime boon in the form of UberEats. The meal delivery service, a branch of the already popular Uber rideshare app, partnered with top restaurants in the city’s downtown core to deliver hot, fresh, not-so-fast food at a marginally higher price ( but promised significantly higher quality) than the average pizza or burger joint.
Take it as a sign of things to come: This year, the consulting firm Technomic predicted meal delivery services will become a $ 3- billion to $ 5- billion segment of the food industry over the next decade. That includes UberEats — which is already available in a handful of U. S. cities where the rideshare service itself is, and all signs across the board point to it being an unmitigated success ( albeit one that doesn’t fully escape the controversies that surround Uber as a whole) — but also a growing cohort of other meal delivery services, from prepared, off- a- r estaurant- menu f ood at lunch and dinner to “chef- created” recipe boxes and frozen entrées. In Toronto, UberEats has been such a success that it expanded in early December, beefing up its offerings to comprise more than 100 restaurants — on the same day a protest against Uber by Toronto taxi drivers shut down several major streets in the downtown core.
And with an increase in services will come a diversification of them. Just look at Vancouver, where batch.food offers chef-made frozen meals for $5-$13 a meal, Be Fresh Local Market serves up diet-tailored and healthy meal plans, Vit Vit Vegan and CHOMP both deliver vegan-only options, and Fitness Foods is 100 per cent paleo. They are just four of a selection of dozens of meal delivery services in the city, and have all opened within the past five years. In 2016, the number should expand exponentially, and probably comprise things like gluten-free foods, organic produce, and, who knows, maybe even foraged ingredients — delivered on bikes!
The gourmet food and prepared meal delivery service trend makes sense, since it checks so many boxes: fast, fresh, healthful and — perhaps most significantly — many carry a bit of foodie cachet, being either chefprepared or adhering to contemporary fad diets, or both. In other words, we’re about to completely run out of excuses for eating like garbage.