DoorDash acquired Chowbotics salad maker robots, the companies announced on Monday. The financial terms of the deal have not been released, but the Chowbotics team has all become DoorDash employees and the company will operate independently within DoorDash.
“We have long admired the work that Chowbotics has done to increase access to fresh meals, with its innovative product and robotics vision,” said DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang in an emailed statement to The Verge. “With the Chowbotics team on board, we can explore new use cases and customers, providing another service to help our merchants grow.”
Chowbotics was founded in 2014 and its fresh food robot Sally – a rectangular machine that is essentially a salad vending machine – can create customizable salads, grain bowls and mince, parfaits, cereals and snacks, all in a small space . The robot is used by companies like universities, hospitals and supermarkets, according to a blog post by DoorDash general manager Penn Daniel.
DoorDash currently has the largest share of the United States food delivery market, around 48%, ahead of rivals like UberEats and Grubhub. Its revenue soared in 2020, as restaurants closed their meals live due to the pandemic and customers depended on delivery services. But when DoorDash went public last year, its IPO was criticized by some analysts as worthless; they questioned how DoorDash would be able to continue to grow if demand for food delivery declined when the pandemic ended.
New Constructs analyst David Trainer said at the time: “We think this proposed public offering of shares is worthless, $ 0, in addition to bailing out private investors before unsuspecting public investors realize that the deal is not viable in their current form. ”
But the acquisition of Chowbotics raises interesting questions about DoorDash’s post-pandemic plans. Daniel wrote in the blog post that Chowbotics will allow DoorDash to help restaurants that use its delivery platform to expand their offerings. It seems likely that Chowbotics vending machines would fit into the phantom kitchen model, which are delivery-only restaurants that some in the industry are cautiously considering. DoorDash has a ghost kitchen in California and last year announced that it was working with Chicago’s Krazy Hog restaurant – which closed personal meals during the pandemic – as part of its Reopen for Delivery initiative.
If you’re asking for delivery, chances are you’ll never know if your salad was made by a Chowbotics robot or a human, unless the restaurant says so. It is not uncommon for restaurants to mark their delivery operations with a different name – such as when some customers discovered that the pizzas they ordered at “Pasqually’s” actually came from the Chuck E. Cheese kids’ restaurant.