DoorDash, the delivery service that’s probably brought McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Chipotle to your door, has acquired Caviar, the delivery app that sold itself as the bougier option — where upscale restaurants like i Sodi in NYC, Destroyer in LA, and Duck Duck Goat in Chicago deigned to sell their wares. The sale, worth $410 million in cash and DoorDash stock, represents a merging of the extreme high and low ends of modern-day food delivery. More broadly, the sale represents another step in the consolidation of the delivery market, a space where platforms once clamored to get into but where few have discovered a way to actually make money at it. And that’s a bad thing for diners, restaurants, and workers.
Caviar, which launched six years ago with 30 restaurants in San Francisco before expanding to other major cities like New York and Seattle, has always marketed itself as a premium alternative in a saturated marketplace (just look at its name). The app boasted a sleek design, pickier offerings that gave off a sense of curation (in the beginning, there was generally only one vendor for each type of cuisine), its own delivery fleet of “food messengers,” and an exclusive selection of restaurants that otherwise didn’t offer delivery. In 2014, Caviar was acquired by mobile payment company Square in a deal reportedly worth about $90 million in stock, likely as a way to bridge the gap between Square’s ordering app and actual delivery.
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