From Covered Carts to DoorDash | Ep. 7

Isn’t it amazing that with just a few taps on your phone you can get a healthy, hot, delicious, multicultural meal prepared and delivered to your doorstep, all in less than an hour? And you can even track it, in real time, every step of the way. But how did we get here? And how are our eating habits changing as a result? In this episode of Keyboard and Quill, we journey through 250 years of history with Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi as they explore how food preparation, consumption, and delivery have evolved from the first known food deliveries in Asia to the dawn of Domino’s Pizza in the 1960s to the global boom of real-time delivery apps like DoorDash, UberEats, and JustEat Takeaway. New episodes every Tuesday from March-June.

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SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Rachel Pedreschi and Claritype
Link: claritype.com

Dr. Rachel Laudan
Book: Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History
Site: rachellaudan.com

Coastal Kites for the music you heard in our interlude.  

--
Story by Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi
Produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund
Edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia
Original music and sound by Jeff Kite, keyboardist for The Voidz

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Transcript

0:00

(radio static chattering)- Okay.- All right.- Hi.- And then the, you're, you are...(all laughing)- One more time.(bright ethereal music)(pencil scratching)- You're listening to-- "Keyboard and Quill."- From StarTree-- Creators of the Real-Time Analytics Summit.- [Group] And podcast.- Hey, I'm Tim Berglund.- And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- In this episode, we're gonna explore the history of food delivery, how we eat meals, how that's changed over time, and how it all leads to DoorDash.- Tim, isn't it amazing that we can tap a few times on a device in our hand and healthy, delicious, multicultural, hot, hopefully, food will be prepared, picked up and then delivered to our doorstep in less than an hour. And we can track it in real-time along the way.- It's like Uber, but for eating. It really is remarkable.- I think you have a product name possibility there.- Maybe so.- And also for a podcast that's not supposed to be about smartphones, we sure talk about smartphones a lot.- We really do. We really do. But you know, let's rewind as we have been doing, and look at a bigger picture. Thinking about food and meal delivery, you know, there's a lot to unpack here. There's always a set of factors that come together into a phenomenon like say, you know, DoorDash and all that kind of thing. And we'll get to that story in a little bit. But first, why do we even cook?- I know a few people who would rather not.- Fair enough, but like fundamentally, why is that a human activity? We spoke to Dr. Rachel Laudan, a food historian who started off by answering this very question.- Let me begin to by distinguishing feeding and cooking. Humans are animals that cook. We're the only animals that transform, in significant ways, plants and animals into food. But working out the consequences of that, we are still doing. The important thing about cooking is that it outsources digestion. We don't have to spend lots of time a day digesting our food, unlike most animals. Digesting is a very energy-intensive activity. So we outsource our digesting to cooking, but that means somebody has to cook or somebody has to feed us. And feeding people is a very complex activity. It requires planning. It requires procuring, growing, or going to the grocery store. It requires what the people in food science call primary processing, turning plants and animals into flour or sugar or oil or something that we can put into meals. It requires secondary processing, producing meals, and then it requires cleanup. And all these are long and complicated and energy-intensive processes.- Okay, so there's primary processing and secondary processing.- And don't forget about cleanup. That's my kid's favorite part of meals.- Oh yes. Everybody's favorite part. I love doing the dishes. Primary processing is about turning animals and plants into things we recognize as, I'll use the term ingredients. And this primary processing has certainly benefited from industrialization as we've discussed previously in the podcast.- The real difficult nut to crack has been the secondary processing, cooking, meal preparation, whichever you want to call it, depending on which social group you are in.- Yeah, and maybe this comes as a surprise to very few of our listeners, but cooking is a lot of work. I think that's something Rachel just said.- But it's not like DoorDash sprung fully formed from its father's forehead in 2012. Like so many other pretty neat ideas, there's a history to this thing.- Yeah, so where did the idea of somebody else making you some food and doing the secondary preparation, bringing it to you, where'd that come from?

Okay, first documented food delivery: 4:04

1768, Seoul, Korea. There's a guy named Hwang Yun-seok. He was a scholar and there's a journal entry of his, it says,"The day after I took the civil service examination, I ordered cold noodles with my companions for lunch, July, 1768."- I love the fact, that he, that there was already civil service examinations and lunch was still in an important part of the day.- You know, take a test, you're hungry, you go. And there's a lot of early food delivery that seems to be happening in Asia before it's happening in other places. Certainly that's the documented beginning.- But it took a hundred years, till 1860, before the first milkmen appeared in Britain. At that point, railways allowed fresh milk to arrive in cities from the countryside. And by 1880 that milk was always in bottles.- Huh, how familiar an image that is.- Right. -It still seems kinda old timey, but-- I remember getting milk delivered. Did you have milk delivery when you were a kid?- When I was a kid, when I was a younger adult, milk delivery in bottles. So it's still a thing.- Totally. In the 1890s, a food delivery system called the dabbawalla, or one who carries the box, sprang up in colonial India. So instead of going home for lunch or leaving their job sites for food, the dabbawallas brought homecooked lunches to the workers directly in boxes. So we've set up a few instances of early food delivery. When we come back from a short break, we've got a romantic, and possibly apocryphal story, about the first-ever pizza delivery.(bright upbeat music)(bright upbeat music continues)(bright upbeat music continues) I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- I'm Tim Berglund.- This is "Keyboard and Quill." We're gonna keep going with our show about the origins of food delivery with the Margherita pizza.- As an American, when I think of early food delivery, pizza comes to mind.- Pizza comes to my mind a lot actually.- Yeah, well it just sort of does. Yeah. There's this beautiful story of the first pizza delivery in 1889 in Italy. It's so beautiful, I'm gonna call it too good to check.- Possibly apocryphal?- Yeah, let's just tell the story with some quantity of salt. This is also the origin of the Margherita pizza. A great form of pizza. So Italy had only recently coalesced into a modern nation state, had been unified. And you know, not everybody was happy about that. That had happened in 1861. And so you have a thing like that, you're gonna have probably increased travel between regions, increased trade and exchange and foods that would've been kind of isolated to a little region might spread out from there. And that's happening during this time. Naples was really where pizza lived prior to the 1860s and it wasn't too popular anywhere outside of that. So in 1878, Queen Margherita, and if you're Italian, I'm gonna ask your forgiveness for the way I'm saying her name. She was the queen of this united Italy. She married her first cousin Umberto and this new royal couple of this newly-formed nation state, Italy, they needed to unify the country, prevent revolution. And so they'd take trips across the country to gain the support of citizens, make everybody happy. And so they visited Naples in 1889 and the story goes, the queen was eating all this fancy food, right? And a lot of that time, that's gonna be French stuff. You're royalty, you're rich, good food is defined as French food in the 19th century. And you know, it gets to you after a little bit. And one night she's like,"Hey, what do the local people eat here? Gimme some commoner food." Which I sympathize with. When I'm traveling, sometimes I just wanna walk down the street, as I say, engage targets of opportunity, find a hole in the wall to walk into and, you know, get a meal like the local folks do. So there they were in Naples where they had been making Neapolitan pizza since the 1600s. And Naples' best-known, most-celebrated pizza chef, Raffaele Esposito, he was summoned and he told he must deliver pizza to the royal's quarters. So he got to work, they made three different kinds of pizza. One with white mozzarella, green basil, and red tomatoes, which, you know, how Italian nationalist is that, right? It's like the new flag,- Right, and she, you know, looking to reinforce this new nation's identity.- Talk about playing to your audience, right? And two other pizzas, which are lost to antiquity at this point. They came outta the oven, rushed them over to be hand delivered to the queen, completing, what is told in this story, as the first pizza delivery ever. Queen Margherita took one bite of the flag-colored pizza and thought,"Wow, this is like the best thing I've ever had." Yeah, again, maybe too good to check, but so beautiful. We'll call that the first pizza delivery.- And just to close the loop on pizza, this isn't so much about delivery, but the wave of Italian immigration, mostly from southern Italy in those 1880s came to the U.S. and mostly to New York and brought pizza. The first U.S. pizzeria was the famous Lombardi's in 1905. And to bring it home even further, today for lunch, I had a Margherita pizza delivered by a DoorDash. But I had not taken a civil service exam.- No, you're tired from spending time in a recording studio, not from a civil service exam. Both very, you know, difficult activity.- Exactly. But I did take a moment to admire the white, red, and green on my pizza. In 1906 there was an advertisement for food delivery and catering in Korea, which appeared in the newspaper. 1922, in LA there was a cafe called Kin-Chu, which called itself the only place on the West Coast making and delivering real Chinese food. So you could call in your orders with your high-tech telephone set.- Whoa.- And luckily we had roads and LA was one of the first places to really make it easy to get around by a car so made a perfect opportunity for delivery. By the 1950s, restaurants that delivered became more and more common. The rise of TV and families watching TV together at home helped drive that.- Ah, so you're having TV night at home and you have somebody deliver you dinner instead of Mom doing all the work to cook it.- Or even using a TV dinner, which were really cool at the time too.- Yes, certainly in the '70s, for some reason they seemed cool. This brings us to a discussion of mealtime. Now, Rachel, you and I are both Americans of about the same age and so we've absorbed this idea that dinnertime is this family event. It's a time for the whole family to sit down together, eat this nutritious, home-cooked meal, to talk, for the parents, to impart values to their children, to talk about what they learned at school that day. And this is wonderful. There are many reasons to depart from this kind of bucolic image of home life, but this is sort of the received image of dinnertime. Would you agree?- 100%. Does it happen in my house? Very rarely.- Like I said, there are many reasons why it might not go down like that. But you and I have absorbed this thing, like that's what it's supposed to be. That's mealtime. And Dr. Laudan had some thoughts on this too.- There's a political aspect to this too. And when I say political, I don't mean just political today. One of the barriers to change in the United States is that the whole political foundation of the United States was republican with a small R. A republican in this sense just means that you do not want monarchies and aristocracies. You want systems of government by the people. Now what distinguishes this small-scale republican from contemporary society is that it takes a while for this to change into a democracy where every citizen has a say in who becomes senators, presidents, et cetera. In the republican view of the world, the man goes out to work and the woman is responsible for the home. And one of the major responsibilities is raising good citizens so they have to be developed morally, mentally, and physically. And the meal is where this is supposed to happen. The dinner table where you sit down, you have good, healthy, home-cooked food cooked by mother and where mother and father's conversation induct the children into the values of the American political experiment. Now we tend to think that this kind of family meal happened throughout history. It didn't. In monarchies and aristocracies, the ruling classes did not eat with their children. The children ate separately. In America, you've got this very deeply-embedded view that the family meal is natural, the obvious way to go. The best thing to have. And I think there is a great deal of value in the family meal, but it creates tension when you start thinking about meals away from home. Because the first kinds of meals away from home tend to be in white-tablecloth restaurants and they are a kind of offshoot of the aristocratic tradition following the French Revolution when the French have got rid of the monarchy, but people who take over control still have this model of eating as being primarily a male activity. Women may be allowed at the table, children certainly aren't allowed at the table. And if you think back to the '50s and '60s when mother and father went out to eat, by and large the children didn't go.- And even to this day, right, we sit down and my 11-year-old now says things like, "How was your day?" Because he has been taught that that's the thing that you're supposed to do when you sit down for a family meal.- And it's a wonderful thing, don't stop. It's just, it's made up in a certain time and place. We do it and there's other ways to do it.- Like so much about the 1950s that were fabricated.- Yeah. But you know, we can see, like Rachel was saying, by mid-century, say the 1950s, that philosophy of mealtime is firmly in place in the United States. Here's what an American documentary was saying about it in 1948.(gentle music)- Well, here's Nancy home from her music lesson and she's setting the table. This is one of her regular jobs. She likes arranging a pretty table for the whole family to enjoy during dinner. And out in the kitchen, the dinners all ready to set on the table. And Mother says "We'll be ready to eat as soon as Father comes home." And here's Father now coming home from his daily work."Hello, Nancy. How are you tonight?" Father says. Then he calls out, "Hello everybody in the kitchen." And oh, is Tony happy. They all work together to get dinner on the table. But even though they're thinking about their fun together after dinner, they're not going to hurry through the meal itself. They make sure that everything is on the table in just the right place.- But I find that interesting'cause I work from home. I definitely attempt to have dinner ready to go by the time that Jason gets home and I have the technology to be able to track him on my phone-- To know-- to be able to time when he gets home.- When he's gonna be home. That's delightful.- Yeah, and I have his coffee ready for him and I try to time dinner appropriately.- There you go. So I think to put it charitably, while the image painted in that little clip was, shall we say, located in a particular time and place.- Right.- The idea of a meal together, for us as Americans is still sort of an unexamined one that that's the thing that we do.- So even by the early 1950s, the concept of this family meal has started to be disrupted by television. Delivery will probably disrupt it further and the idea of meal delivery already seems to be taking root, starting with...- Pizza.- Pizza. So in Ypsilanti, Michigan in 1960, a group of businessmen bought an existing pizza restaurant with the idea that they were going

to start something new: 16:28

pizza delivery. It wasn't called Domino's until 1965 and they started franchising in 1967. Across the pond in 1962, an Edinburgh chippy started delivering fish and chips via car to the larger metropolitan area.- Rachel, what's a chippy?- It's a fish-and-chip shop.- Oh, okay.- So you get fried fish and chips wrapped in yesterday's newspaper.- Yes. Massive comfort food. I'm here for it.- A little bit of salt, vinegar, ketchup.- Okay.- But in general, pizza delivery is what led the way. Pizza's easy to transport. It's flat, it's efficient to pack into a car or the back of a bike and it's, for the most part, still pretty tasty 30 minutes after it gets outta the oven if it stays warm. And it's not like cold pizza is somehow bad, though according to my children, if their school pizza is cold, they have no interest in it. And so I had to do a little experiment.- Yeah?- And I went around and I ordered a bunch of takeaway pizzas and let them sit for an hour.- Okay.- And then we did a taste test, which pizzas were still mostly edible.- You did this?- Yeah, we did.- You did this food science at home? Okay.- We did, you know, we also enjoyed eating pizza, so.- Well you're also eating pizza. Yeah, That's seems like a win. But what did you learn?- It seems to be the amount of cheese that is on the pizza is inversely proportional to how good it is after an hour.- Really? So more cheese seems like a win, but over time it decays. It falls off faster.- Especially for children. They don't want a big thing of cold mozzarella cheese.- It's funny how many, you know, foods really have this utility profile over time. Like coffee when it's very hot, it's good. As soon as it becomes cold, it's like there's extreme negative utility in drinking it. I thought pizza just was good, hot or cold, but you're telling me there's a difference.- Well and think about the extreme of like french fries.- Yeah, no. French fries are like trash after 15 minutes. That's a thing that doesn't really DoorDash very well.- In the 1970s, Chinese food delivery became widespread in New York City. So you know those wax paperboard cartons that we still get our Chinese delivery today? Those were actually patented back in 1894.- Oh my goodness. That is an amazing technology lifecycle. And it's kind of funny, Chinese shows up in this kind of early food delivery phase in the U.S., in the U.S. story. So pizza, it's pretty easy to see why that's a part of the situation. I think just based on the reading that we've done, two things going on with Chinese. Number one, it's another food that is generally successful 30 minutes later, like the rice is still gonna be warm and the whatever. And again, the early history of food delivery is the very early stuff we started with is fundamentally Asian. I was talking to a friend recently who grew up in Korea. She was a kid there in the '80s in Seoul. And she said in her apartment building, which was in a kind of nice part of town, there'd be vendors in the morning wandering around the building, hocking eggs and tofu first thing in the morning. And like her mom would go downstairs or sometimes send her downstairs, buy some tofus and eggs, make a breakfast, which is more primary processing than secondary processing. That's not meal delivery, but Instacart, before Instacart. Dr. Laudan had some more to say about meal delivery and how it seems to be shifting over time.- In the last 150 years, one way of looking at it is one huge series of experiments trying to deal with how we can reduce the labor in the final stage of putting ingredients together and producing something that you can put on the table in front of people.- It really is challenging to get cost out of that secondary preparation step. But after a short break, we'll dial up to the early internet in 1995. But first, let's replenish our social credits with a word from our sponsor.- At the tone, please record your message.(tone beeps)- Hi, this is William Rickman from Oakland, California."Keyboard and Quill" is made possible by StarTree hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit, an annual conference that brings together professionals in the data space to discuss harnessing actionable insights from real-time data. Join us to learn, teach, connect, and have an amazing time with the best community in the user-facing real-time analytics world.- Register now at rtasummit.com. I'm Tim Berglund.- I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- This is "Keyboard and Quill." We're gonna keep going with our show about the origins of food delivery with the advent of online delivery.- So let's go fast forward to the beginnings of the first dot-com boom, 1995, when a food delivery service, launched as World Wide Waiter, served the local Bay Area and it still operates today at Waiter.com, which is probably a better name.- It probably is. World Wide Waiter sounds like somebody trying to use IE4 with a dial-up modem.(modem chirps)- Yeah, just insert sound of dial-up right there. So just a few years later in 2001 Just Eat was founded in the UK. Now in places like the UK and Australia, there was already a long-standing tradition of takeaway restaurants that just had a counter and a kitchen, so like the chippies that I was talking about earlier.- I was in one of these in a small town in Australia last week.- Right. And you order your food and they give it to you wrapped in paper. You take the food next door to the pub or to your living room, wherever. It's a big step. But you can see how it's a natural smaller revolution. Takeaway joints are already there to give you stuff to walk away with.- Yeah, okay. So it's not as big a step as here's a sit-down restaurant and somebody go in there and get a meal. It's the kind of place where you already go get a thing and take it somewhere. So it's easier to think about turning this into a service. That makes sense.- And I remember Waiter.com and World Wide Waiter being used a lot for corporate delivery. So when we were sitting in an office and somebody was gonna treat us for lunch, it was a lot easier to use a service like that.- Yeah, And Waiter.com is, as of this recording, still a going concern. And I think that's kind of the business that they're in now. And Just Eat is also still a going concern now called Just Eat Takeaway, and it's a big European meal delivery business. Now those takeout places are hardly unique to the Anglosphere, right? They're just this moderately-low-capital way of outsourcing meal prep to a local provider, right? The kitchen is there, but you don't have vertically-integrated dining room and kitchen like in a restaurant. Just do the kitchen and make it super cheap, and there's that kitchen, they'll batch things up enough to realize a little bit of scale economies and make dinner for you at a price you're willing to pay, probably more than you'd pay if you did the labor, but hey, yeah, I guess you're busy, right?- And they already have staff on hand to wrap up your items in a to-go container.- Yeah.- Rather than serving you at a table.- Yeah, which is itself a lower cost thing. You're gonna be tipping if you're in the U.S. and like it's this sort of cheaper way to do that. Dr. Laudan had some experience with that in places outside the Anglosphere and had some great thoughts on it.- And I'm not sure how big this is, but I think another thing that's going on is that when I have lived in other parts of the world, Mexico for example, there is a very active small business activity in widows, or people who like to cook, or single women setting up small restaurants or small takeout places that serve a set of neighbors in a couple of blocks area, something like that. In Mexico, that's a way you solve the meal problem. The lawyer's wife will stop at the school where some of these ladies are, when she picks up her children, and buy a meal from them or she will stop at the neighbor who has meals prepared in her home and take them. As you get societies like America where we are rather paranoid about safety and small businesses of this kind, all kinds of regulations get put into place to stop people making these ad-hoc, small-scale arrangements. When these experiments are going on with different ways to eat, it's not just a matter of the size of the household or whether everybody's got a cell phone that they can call on, it's also a matter of rethinking social and political implications of the meal.- I remember when food trucks were first becoming a thing in the early 2000s, and the first cities, I remember LA being like a hotbed of that sort of activity.- Pretty much anything car related, LA was the hotbed of that activity.- Exactly, exactly. Even turning a car into a kitchen. At first they kind of cracked down on 'em from a regulatory perspective and you've got all this ethnic diversity in a city like LA and the capability to deliver a huge number of world cuisines expertly with this takeaway model. Except now even the takeaway restaurant is mobile and it's hard to make the transition to little micro-budget kitchens doing that kind of thing, right? There are anxieties to get over.- But in LA's defense, most of these wonderful multicultural meals came out of little tiny kitchens in strip malls.- Right, right, right. I guess my point is, there's this process that we go through when this new model emerges and we're like, "Ah, how do we do this?" And then, you know, food trucks are now a thing. With this, you begin to see the pieces being put in place that seem to be pointing to a new way of eating. More choices, smaller providers, a way of getting food made for you that isn't vertically integrated or doesn't have a vertically-integrated kitchen and dining room like the restaurant experience we had known before. You kind of see those pieces coming into play in the early 2000s.- So in 2004, GrubHub was founded and originally it was an alternative to paper menus, which seems a little odd in the pre-smartphone era.- Yeah. How did that work?- Honestly, I'm not really too sure. But luckily in 2007 the iPhone was launched and we covered this in some detail in a previous episode, but it is a definitely a key enabler in what's to come.- In that same year, interestingly, Domino's introduced online and mobile ordering. I wasn't doing this then, but I remember a few years later, it was probably early 20-teens, their app was very real-timey. You know, you'd place the order, you'd build the pizza, and it would show the little pizza icon and things on that you're putting on the pie. And then it would say,"Okay, Darren is preparing your pizza right now and now your pizza's in the oven. And okay, now Gamala is delivering it, she'll be there in 10 minutes." And it was all very real-time and wonderful.- And I'm still using that today for that aforementioned pizza delivery for school.- It is funny, isn't it, Rachel, how I am speaking of Domino's delivery as somehow a thing of the past, probably betraying I don't order a lot of Domino's these days, but yes, in fact it still works that way.- And I personally order 27 pizzas every Tuesday.- I love that journey for you.- I don't. I'd really like to not do that anymore. But anyway, it didn't take very long for these two concepts to sort of merge, an online ordering platform and delivery. So in 2012, DoorDash and Instacart both launched. And DoorDash is really the beginning of what we now know as online mobile app meal delivery. You can browse the menus of local sit-down restaurants, place an order and have the prepared meal delivered right to your door with payment and tip settled through the apps. And they'll even tell you if you don't want contact or not, it's great. But this also drew on the gig economy labor structure that was recently pioneered by Uber.- We talked about that a little bit in the episode on transportation. That's a big deal and it seems to be spreading.- Yeah, and Instacart was more about the gig-economy-fied grocery shopping, the primary preparation step minus the secondary preparation.- Ah yes.- 2013, a very similar service called Deliveroo was founded in Europe, and in 2014 Uber said,"Hey, we already have all these gig drivers, and we have all these people driving stuff and we have a mobile app, let's create..." take it away, Tim.(drum roll builds)- Uber Eats!- That's right. It was a natural fit-- Of course.- Since DoorDash had arguably beaten them at their own game. In 2014, GrubHub pivots and starts a more DoorDash-style delivery. So delivery for any restaurant that doesn't have its own delivery service. Zomato, very similarly, which had been founded in 2008, has started its meal delivery service in India in 2015. So the market is definitely heating up.- That's right. At this time you have services all over the planet doing this thing. Somebody will go to a restaurant, pick up the meal you want that you've ordered through an app, bring it to you, you pay 'em through the app and it's a wonderful time to be alive. But here's a question. Why? Why, why? Why is this phenomenon emerging here and now? You know, pizza and Chinese food have had delivery-friendly mechanisms kind of integrated with them for decades, at least in the U.S. Maybe, like we were talking about, because they remain tasty for a while and are easy to transport around. But now we're suddenly trying to do it with everything. I wanna be able to get a hamburger and fries delivered to me through an app. Is it just because we have smartphones now? I mean it seems like, really, to make this work you need smartphones. We haven't even talked about the experience of the delivery driver who doesn't know where you live. You know, they don't go to your house.- And they might need a map.- They might need a map and they might need a little device that shows a little blue dot where they are and shows them the route to take. I mean they're gonna need smartphone mapping for this to work. So that's a necessary condition. But I don't know that it was sufficient. Like I don't know that that really explains the rise of meal delivery. What are the economics of that? Dr. Laudan again has a pretty good story here.- Another thing that I think is very fascinating about what's going on right now is that it's global. This seems to be springing up simultaneously across the globe. So what is changing across the globe? Not so much at the labor level, but at the demand level to create this. A lot of things have been happening. We've got now a dense urban population almost everywhere in the world. Over 50% of the world is now urban. That was not true even a hundred years ago. In most parts of the world a hundred years ago, because of the need to produce food, most parts of the world were 90% rural. Along with this, you've got another thing happening, assuming that not everybody, but many people are fed in households, you've got declining household size. Household size around the world is going down from about six to seven per household to just over two per household. Now if you've got six or seven people in a household, it may make sense economically to have one of those people spending a large proportion of their time on cooking. If you've got two people in a household, or in America, there are, you know, there's a huge number of single-person households. Then, if every one of those households has to prepare their own meals, that's an incredibly inefficient thing to do. And you are prepared to pay for it, and, of course, then you have to be rich enough to pay for it and they're prepared to pay a premium to free up the time that would've been spent cooking.- Yeah, that makes a huge amount of sense. The labor of meal preparation is maybe a more rational investment to make if it's amortized over more eaters. But with fewer mouths, you start to wonder why you're bothering. Now people still cook and some people truly enjoy, so-called, secondary food preparation as an activity, but it's less utility now. And in economic terms, more consumption, good. In other words, it's a thing you do 'cause you like it. And as Dr. Laudan said, it's still cheaper to cook your own food. Meal delivery moves food prep out of your kitchen and into another one that maybe is operating more efficiently due to scale. But you still have the labor of the single meal deliverer and that doesn't scale.- But Tim, there's also something that happened pretty pivotal in early 2020. It was called COVID.- And sure before the pandemic we had, you know, pizza nights and the occasional sushi delivery or whatever it is you're into. But when the pandemic hit, the world shifted on its dining axis very quickly.- Like suddenly every restaurant was either pivoting to delivery or expanding their services. And it wasn't just your usual takeout. We saw an incredible rise in high-end restaurant meals arriving at doorsteps, gourmet style.- Yeah, and I even saw a few restaurants doing, you know, kitting up grocery delivery'cause they still had their primary processed inputs, a way to get them and they couldn't sell food to anybody. So they were, you know, doing whatever they could to survive. And alongside of all this was the birth of curbside pickup. So you had restaurants creating these seamless systems where you're just gonna roll up and there'd be someone with a mask on, ready, somehow knowing what car you're driving. They'd give you your meal without you ever leaving your car. This is what had been like a late-night taco run sort of activity or a thing you did to pacify hangry children with burgers at the drive-through as you shuttled them from one activity to another was now a delivery modality available to all kinds of meals from curries to steaks to-- Like Michelin-starred kaiseki.- Yeah, right.- But it wasn't just food, the pandemic accelerated the delivery of, well, everything, groceries, books, you name it. If it existed, there was a way to get it delivered to your door, minimizing contact and keeping safety in check.- Yeah, and some of these companies, I remember seeing a talk given online during the pandemic from an engineering executive at Instacart about the explosion in their business in the opening weeks of the pandemic. It was like 5 or 10 years of growth realized in eight weeks. It hurt, which pushed innovation. There was innovation due to companies, you know, getting a new volume of business they weren't used to and having to implement new business processes. Lots of software had to pivot very quickly. Apps became a little friendlier. We saw the rise of contactless payments, in-app delivery instructions, real-time tracking. It was like living in space.- And I'm still amazed by this seemingly simple but incredibly difficult-to-implement buy online and pick up in-store, which actually predated COVID. But without the innovations in real-time inventory management from a decade earlier, none of this would've been possible.- No it wouldn't have. And it's also important to keep in mind that all this was powered by an incredible network of people working for a living, delivery drivers, kitchen staff, restaurant owners, all adapting on the fly, particularly in the early days of the pandemic, being very uncertain about the health consequences that that they were taking on. You know, as we think about the pandemic, the resilience and innovation shown by those folks at this time were just remarkable.- And speaking of remarkable, luckily humans at this point had invented roads and cars and mobile phones and GPS maps on those mobile phones. It seemed like a perfect example of the culmination of almost everything we've talked about in our previous episodes.- It really has. But you know, now in our post-pandy life, where are we with all this? Well, you know, Dr. Laudan has helped us see some of the significance of meal preparation and meal time and meal delivery. And made me think of this little place down the street from where I live in Mountain View called Local Kitchens. And I think it's just a Bay Area thing, I'm not quite sure. Somehow it's got the menus and ingredients and processes of a few different local joints all under one roof. You can just roll up, you can call ahead, and it's kinda like takeaway place, right? It's just a counter with no dining room and you get the food you want from the restaurant you want, your spouse gets what they want, the kids get what they want. You could even have DoorDash, some other meal delivery service, pick it up and bring it to you. This is a different spin on eating than the traditional, "Well, this is what's for dinner and if you don't like it, you can go to bed hungry," or, "Just two bites of your Brussels sprouts and then you can have some dessert."- "Eat your flimsy french fries that have been steamed."- Right. (laughs) That's just unappetizing. But you know, now each person picks what they want. And that's kind of a different way to think about eating. Here's Dr. Laudan again.- What people want now with meal delivery is not just a choice of a meal every day, but they want a meal for every member of the family and a meal from every world cuisine with which they are familiar. So that they might want pizza for the teenage boy and fried chicken for the wife and something else, a fancy dinner for the dad. But where does this fit with the politics? I'm toying with the idea of saying this is liberal democracy where everybody can make their own choice. And this is really interesting because on the one hand I'm a big believer in choice. I've had this lucky life where I can make lots of choices and I think that's wonderful. But choice has a cost in everything. It gives you decision fatigue. It is very demanding. It is socially potentially threatening, particularly with food because somewhere deep down sharing food is a way of establishing community. And if every member of the family picks their own meal, it does have I think an effect on social cohesion. We've all had the experience in the last few years of going to some event or putting on an event and you have to cater to the food choices of every person in that event instead of the old thing. It's a social event. Unless it's something that is really going, you really can't handle, you smile politely and swallow hard and get it down because that's the way you show that you are part of this group.- You know, I don't like this trend. I don't want my kids to think that they can order anything they want and they can eat anything they want. They have to eat what I give them. Darn it.- Yeah, there are real trade-offs to choice. And you know, some of the things about choices in food menus is greater awareness of allergies. And you know, I've got people in my family where there actually are things that they can eat that can make them die. And that's very real. But everybody getting to check their own box, it's good, I like checking my own box, but like she said, there really is a trade off.- Yeah, there's not a liberal democracy in my household, especially at meal times.- I absolutely believe you. And you know, let's look back. We started all this with the first known meal delivery service in Korea in 1768.- And milkmen in Britain in 1860.- In 1889, There was that great and certainly true story about Margherita pizza and the Queen of Italy- And the dabbawallas bringing lunches in 1890s.- 1906, we have documented food delivery happening in a widespread way in Seoul, Korea.- And Chinese food is being delivered in LA in 1922.- By the '50s restaurants start forming a habit of having a delivery option.- And in 1960, Domino's, the grandfather of pizza delivery, begins.- 1962, we've got the chippies of Edinburgh delivering fish and chips.- And in the '70s, Chinese food delivery becomes common in New York City,- The earliest days of the web, 1995, the World Wide Waiter is launched.- And just a few years later Just Eat is in the UK.- 2004, GrubHub,- 2012, DoorDash.- That same year, Instacart for grocery delivery.- And in 2014, Uber Eats and GrubHub enter the chat with their own meal delivery service.- 2015 Zomato pivots to a meal delivery service in India.- And in 2020, before you know it, the pandemic hits and these services become so much more important than we could have expected.- And now they're still with us being convenient, offering us choices, and probably slowly changing the way we eat.- So it seems clear that meal delivery is with us to stay. Declining household sizes, increasing urbanization, and an overall faster pace of life point to the continued growth of this trend.- You know, at another time, I don't think we played the clip, but Dr. Laudan suggested at one point french fries might become a delicacy in the future because if we use meal delivery more and more often, and french fries don't really deliver very well, they'll become this thing that, you know, you have to go to the restaurant to get. That would be a strange change'cause they're not regarded as haute cuisine now.- But in general, this will also change the way we think about mealtime and it will probably even change the kind of foods we like as we get exposed to more and more different types of foods from all over the world.- What comes next? Drone meal delivery, self-driving car meal delivery, the rise of home cooking as a retro, throwback artisanal hobby.- We certainly got a taste of that with the sourdough and banana bread boom during COVID.- We sure did. And you know, regardless of where we're going, we're gonna keep eating and hopefully keep doing it together.(bright ethereal music) Many thanks to Dr. Rachel Laudan for her contribution to this episode. You can find links to her work in the show notes.- Also, thank you to Coastal Kites for the music you heard during our interlude. It's available on Spotify and Apple Music. Our show is produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund. It was written by Tim Berglund-- And Rachel Pedreschi. It was edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia, and our amazing original music and sound design were created by Jeff Kite of The Voids.- "Keyboard and Quill" is made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit. Register now at rtasummit.com.- You can subscribe to"Keyboard and Quill" for free wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Please leave us a comment and a rating if you have a minute. And if you're a data professional, you should check out the"Real-Time Analytics" podcast, which we launched in early 2023. New episodes every Monday, link in the show notes. I'm Tim Berglund.- And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- See you next time.(bright ethereal music)