You’re thinking about delivery wrong

“There are customers, there are restaurants, and there are drivers. And none of these people are happy.” Chris Baggott makes the case for prioritizing digital business.

What if we’re thinking about restaurant delivery all wrong?

That’s a scary question, but also the premise of a conversation I recently had with Chris Baggott, a restaurant owner and successful tech entrepreneur. He launched ClusterTruck, a delivery-only restaurant business in 2017 — before virtual brands were trendy. Years later, the software that launched ClusterTruck’s success across the Midwestern US has become Empower Delivery, a software company built specifically to power delivery-only businesses.

Baggott is a relative industry newcomer, but a storied tech veteran. He started and sold two successful companies to tech giants, one to Salesforce, another to Oracle. He sees the restaurant industry as the last frontier of digitization and modernization, and a sudden spotlight on delivery has rocked its foundation. The delivery business has since boomed and third-party providers have seen business soar to tremendous heights — but hat doesn’t mean it’s the best way forward.

In fact, the biggest problem could be hidden in plain sight. “There are customers, there are restaurants, and there are drivers. And none of these people are happy,” he told me recently. 

He’s not wrong.

It’s worth considering how we got here in the first place, blinded by technology that upended restaurants.