The Hunger Games:
An On-Demand Dinner Battle
Food delivery apps are everywhere in San Francisco’s food wars. But which ones are actually any good?
By Lauren Smiley and Sandra Upson
Before there was a tech boom in San Francisco, there were booming restaurants. Here, we rank burritos the way other cities rate sports teams. Food is a water cooler topic. An extracurricular. Political, even. Yet a movement is afoot to reverse our most beloved gastronomic pastime. To make this city not about eating out, but, instead, about eating in.
Entering a grocery store is so 2010, my friend. No longer is fetching food something that professionals must do: Instead, tech has created a kajillion companies whose hustling couriers claim they’ll bring dinner on-demand to their homes and glass office buildings.
Yet because Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley, we only ever hear about the business, the funding, the disruption. We never hear which ones are any good, and which ones are plain awful.
Here’s the deal: We’re pitting the dinner delivery apps against each other, in the name of hunger and bloodsport. We’re testing the services on what, for most of them, is home turf, and we’re giving them a serious test: San Francisco’s brutal Financial District rush-hour.
And here’s what we want to know: do you get better and faster food from the companies that deliver from existing restaurants — Seamless, Eat24 and Postmates — or from on-demand startups running their own kitchens: Munchery, SpoonRocket, Sprig?
It’s a contest in which the apps and their couriers have no idea they’re competing, but we’ve made a few considerations to make this as fair as possible. Companies like Munchery — which make and deliver their own meals — have a time advantage over the apps relying on a restaurant cooking up and boxing the food after customers hit the order button. So we gave the latter apps a break and chose to order from the same Vietnamese sandwich joint just two blocks away. Yep, in the name of fair reviews, we’re prepared to look really goddamn lazy.
We don’t place the same exact orders, because we actually want to eat the stuff, also because the restaurant set a $25 minimum for delivery on two of the services, meaning you have to load up. For Munchery, SpoonRocket and Sprig, we order whatever we like from their custom menus.
At 5:00 p.m., we do a dramatic 3–2–1 countdown, and click “Submit,” “Place Order,” or any number of other undramatic calls to battle.
The Hunger Games are on.
Immediately, Munchery offers an ETA of 24 minutes. Postmates predicts that the restaurant will need 15 minutes of “prep time,” but stays mum on delivery. Two text messages from Sprig announce that our meatloaf should arrive in 10 to 20 minutes. We learn from SpoonRocket that our spaghetti and meatballs will show up in 15 to 25 minutes, though the spoon-wielding rocket on the geotracking already suggests it’s just four blocks away.
From Seamless, we hear nothing. No confirmation email, no delivery estimate on the web site.
At 5:01 and 36 seconds, SpoonRocket rushes ahead, updating its delivery window to 3 to 6 minutes. We all gasp a little — SpoonRocket, what speed you have.
5:09 p.m.
Everyone’s busy taking screenshots and playing with real-time geo-tracking when the phone rings. An automated voice in some vaguely Australian accent tells us to go out to the curb to pick up a delivery, a logistics hack the company uses to keep drivers clipping along. By the time we’re out on the sidewalk to grab the spaghetti and meatballs out of the delivery guy’s car, it’s been 9 minutes, 26 seconds — less time than it takes to find an actual box of uncooked spaghetti at a supermarket. The delivery guy seems confusedly happy when we tell him he’s won. Then he reveals his secret: SpoonRocket’s hub is just two blocks away, and we were the first address on his route.
5:17 p.m.
Eight minutes later, Munchery arrives. One of our designers yips with joy over the picnic-themed packaging around her fish tacos, and an unexpected free cookie.
5:21 p.m.
Before she can take her first bite, a Postmates courier appears with the first banh mi order: it wins the brick-and-mortar delivery heat.
We check the Eat24 web site. It has a nifty stopwatch that tells you how long it’s been since you placed the order.
But when we look, we do a double-take: the stopwatch has jumped back 11 minutes in time. Lying about how long customers have been waiting, are we, Eat 24? Slick.
(A company spokesperson wrote in an email, “That definitely isn’t something that is supposed to happen.”)
5:29 p.m.
Sprig pops in with the meatloaf, the last of the master-of-their-own-kitchen companies.
5:35 p.m.
Shady digital shenanigans aside, Eat24's courier enters Medium 14 minutes after the Postmates delivery guy showed up with his order from the same restaurant. But we forgive Eat24's guy, for one, because of the minimum $25 order, meaning the restaurant had to cook up a whole lot more food. Also, because the courier looks like he just pedaled out of the Tour de France.
And now only one of us is left without food. Seamless, stat! The screen still hasn’t changed — we’re not even sure the order went through. The Seamless website says the Vietnamese restaurant is closed. Wha?
We call the restaurant, and a pleasant lady says our order is just waiting for a courier. At 5:45, finally, an email from Seamless finally arrives. The subject line says “Confirmed! Estimated Delivery: -16 --1 minutes.” Before we try to grapple with this bold math, we check the body of the email: “Estimated Delivery Time: 30–45 minutes.” From now? From when we placed the order? Baffling.
5:49 p.m.
Four minutes later we get a phone call. It’s this guy, calling from the elevator bank.
Yup, the Eat24 guy is the Seamless guy. He tells us he actually works for a third-party service called TCB Courier. When we get TCB Courier on the phone later, the CTO tells us they’re a “DIY, punk-rock kind of company.” In what way, we don’t know.
TCB has relationships with Seamless and Eat24 as well as individual restaurants. Once they receive an order, the couriers decide as a team which one of them will take the job, via their radios — and anything from the app’s to the chef’s speed affects performance.
So, with our bellies stuffed and numbers crunched, here’s the rundown:
SpoonRocket annihilated the competition on speed — but on taste, not so much. “The spaghetti made me think of post-budget cut United Airlines,” said our taste tester. Also, she wilted at the sight of her teeny tiny Cappuccino Chocolate Mousse Duo ($2.50).
Of the kitchen-owning companies, Munchery was the clear winner. Tasty food arrived in an admirable 17:47, and reports suggest that the flavors were great (minus some wilted cabbage), as was the portion size. We didn’t have anything nice to say about Sprig’s meatloaf. Also, it arrived 9 minutes late.
As for customer service, only Eat24 (owned by Yelp) and Seamless (owned by GrubHub) didn’t offer geotracking, which were also the slowest deliveries and used a third-party courier. (Weirdly enough, the couriers have geotracking, TCB’s CTO told us, though that visibility doesn’t extend to customers.) Get with it, old guard.
The final significant metric is price. Here again, Seamless and Eat24 brought up the rear. The restaurant’s $25 minimum — which forced us to order more food than we wanted —and a $5 delivery fee drove up the cost, and then they arrived last. Solo eaters, take note.
We learned that startups make big claims and have slick apps, but that most of the food could use some work. Seamless’s site is a mess and their emails nonsensical, and Eat24 is a time-flubbing fibber. This is all based on one trial run, so of course, nothing we learned is definitive, except this: not everyone can be a winner in the Hunger Games, but maybe, just maybe, you’ll get acquired by one.
