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Amazon may be delivering Chipotle burritos or Five Guys burgers to customers’ doors in future — according to Bloomberg News (via the Seattle Times), the retail giant has now partnered with New York company Olo, which runs ordering and paying technology for some 200 restaurant chains in the country.
Restaurant delivery isn’t new for Amazon — it started offering the service from its Prime Now app back in 2015 (delivery is now run through Amazon Restaurants). But those deliveries come more from independent restaurants over chains. Access to Olo’s customers would be a dramatic expansion — with chains like Chipotle and Applebees already signed on to Olo, the ordering service has access to around 40,000 restaurant locations in the United States.
Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer is among Olo’s investors, and Olo worked on developing Shake Shack’s app, so Shake Shack delivery (at least when Seattle finally has one) is on the table, too.
Delivery pushes new bounds again. We’re thrilled to team up with @Amazon to serve more on-demand guests. https://t.co/Rt62ync5Lm
— Olo (@Olo) September 22, 2017
Amazon would have to shoulder the burden of delivery in the partnership — Olo’s technology is squarely focused on ordering and paying (for example, apps, or touch-screens in restaurants that allow anti-social customers to avoid contact with actual human servers).
Olo also has a newer product, Dispatch, which helps integrate its ordering system with external delivery companies — obviously, this would help pair the two companies’ services together.
Amazon gets one extra perk out of the possible deal — given that people would generally order food more often than Amazon’s non-edible products (not to mention the current boom in food delivery), the online megalith would have access to a whole lot more data about consumption patterns of its customers.
There’s no word yet on when Amazon might start deliveries — and only one Olo user, Italian chain Buca di Beppo, has confirmed that it wants in on the Amazon Restaurants service.
