Amazon.com Inc. may soon bring Shake Shack burgers and Chipotle burritos to your door as it pushes deeper into the growing market for restaurant delivery.
The e-commerce titan has been working to crack the code on food delivery for at least a decade. Now that Amazon has a major toehold in the grocery industry following its $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods Market, it’s trying to muscle into the restaurant business.
Amazon has teamed up with a company called Olo, which provides digital order and pay technology to 200 restaurant brands with about 40,000 U.S. locations, potentially giving Amazon access to a slew of delivery orders. Buca di Beppo, which runs about 90 Italian eateries, is the only Olo customer so far to publicly say it will use Amazon Restaurants.
The $1.5 trillion U.S. food market is split roughly between groceries and restaurants. Food deliveries appeal to Amazon because of the frequency of orders, putting it in constant contact with shoppers and helping it collect valuable data about their preferences even if they don’t make much, if any, money on individual transactions.
