In case anyone was overwhelmed or even jaded by the shiny, giant delivery players speaking on stage at the Food On Demand Conference today—Grubhub, UberEats, Postmates, Google and their impressive peers—along came Delivery Dudes’ founder Jayson Koss, speaking truth to power in funny fashion and rocking the best hair of the conference.
He founded Delivery Dudes in 2009 and is now in 60 to 70 cities. “Our drivers are happy, we’ve never had a drivers strike to this day,” he said, with a little jab at Uber. “When I started the company, restaurants would say no, no, no, our food doesn’t travel,” so Delivery Dudes would order the food the chefs said wouldn’t travel, put it in thermal packs and wait 10 minutes, and then eat the food with the chefs. ”This partnership-building is what got the restaurants on board to work with Delivery Dudes,” he said.
…He urged restaurant operators to understand the digital space, starting with Google Knowledge Panel, which serves as the restaurant’s business page. He noted the point when “all of a sudden” a DoorDash button showed up on these pages, telling customers to order through the service, and yet “80 percent of restaurants didn’t know that was existing.”
He speculated amusingly how those DoorDash buttons appeared. “Because of the way Doordash had their data structured, or whaterever it was—I’m not really sure. Conspiracy?” he said, waving his hands above that big hairdo, then adding to laughs from the audience: “Yes, take your lanyards off.”