Advances in on-demand technology have made it possible to request nearly anything with the push of a button. That’s upended nearly every economic sector, and the food industry is no exception. Not only has technology made it easier to fulfill orders and make deliveries, it has also granted more creative freedom to companies seeking to provide enhanced experiences for their customers.
Food Delivery Companies to Know
- DoorDash
- Good Eggs
- Gopuff
- Imperfect Foods
- Instacart
- Postmates
- Shipt
- Uber Eats
In recent years, the food delivery industry has seen the rise of meal-kit boxes, food subscription services, office catering and a variety of other methods of putting food on people’s plates. Many are also tackling issues of sustainability and equity, utilizing food delivery as a means to support small scale farmers, reduce food waste and increase global health.
The food delivery companies listed below range in specialty and mission, but they all have one common goal: to connect people with food. Take a look at how they’re shaking up the world of cuisine.
35 Food Delivery Companies to Know
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Favor’s Texas-only on-demand food delivery and ordering platform allows customers in a huge range of in-state locations to have restaurant food, groceries and even dry cleaning delivered to their door. The company says its fleet of “runners” work on a gig basis and are “personal assistants, not delivery drivers.”
Headquarters: Chicago, Illinois
Tovala offers a food delivery and prep system that allows its customers to cook chef-created meals at home with minimal prep or cooking time. The company sets them up with a smart oven and then delivers prepared meals that can be popped into the oven. With the scan of the barcode on the food’s packaging, meals are cooked to “chef-perfected results.”
Headquarters: Los Angeles, California
ChowNow is a behind-the-scenes supporter of the restaurant industry, providing tech-powered solutions for ordering, delivery, marketing and customer service. The company provides its industry clients with a central platform for organizing and managing curbside pickup, delivery and reservations, and helps build a more appealing and interactive online experience for their customers.
Headquarters: Gloucester, Massachusetts
Cometeer is a subscription-based delivery service that sends frozen coffee pods to customers’ homes. Partnered with 10 U.S. coffee roasting companies, Cometeer brews their respective coffee then freezes each pod with liquid nitrogen before sending them out for delivery. Pods can be delivered from a weekly to monthly basis, and are guaranteed a shelf life of at least 18 months due to their frozen state.
Headquarters: New York, New York
Daily Harvest delivers fresh fruits, vegetables and other produce to customers on a subscription basis. The company’s variety of meal offerings includes soups, harvest bowls, flatbreads, chia bowls and other meals designed to make healthy eating more accessible.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Farmstead is grocery delivery and software service operating across U.S. metropolitan areas. Along with delivering grocery products at “lower prices than the stores,” Farmstead also sells their Grocery OS software to other grocers. Grocery OS seeks to help grocers expedite and automate their in-house and delivered grocery operations, with the ability to integrate the software into existing infrastructures.
Headquarters: New York, New York
Goldbelly is a meal delivery service with the goal of supporting the sale of delicacies from small restaurants in U.S. metropolitan areas. The company seeks out local restaurants to partner with, and provides customers the opportunity to receive their orders from anywhere in the country — a Philadelphia cheesesteak can be sent to a home in Los Angeles, or vice versa. With its service, Goldbelly has been credited for saving a handful of small U.S. food businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Headquarters: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Juggling professional and personal responsibilities becomes more manageable when Gopuff takes shopping off the to-do list. The company supplies pickup and delivery services in cities across the country for items related to grocery, cleaning, bath and beauty, and other areas. With a fixed delivery fee of $2.95 and 24/7 delivery in several of its areas, Gopuff markets itself as an option for buyers with busy schedules.
Headquarters: New York, New York
Grubhub is an internationally recognized food delivery tech company that connects customers with their favorite restaurants and foods through its online web platform. With almost two decades of food delivery experience under its belt, the company counts over 300,000 restaurants as its partners and also includes Seamless, AllMenus and MenuPages within its portfolio of brands.
Headquarters: New York, New York
Blank Street is a coffee and food retailer operating out of battery-powered carts and street corner kiosks. With its mobile app, Blank Street handles pickup and delivery orders, while loyal customers earn points. The company’s ultimate aim is to make quality coffee that’s affordable and accessible.
Headquarters: Santa Monica, California
Duffl is an on-demand food and snack delivery service that operates on college campuses across the country. The best part? In an effort to maintain carbon-neural standards, Duffl’s fleet of delivery drivers — also college students — uses electric scooters to get around.
Headquarters: New York, New York
Relay is helping businesses take advantage of third-party delivery services at a lower cost. The delivery-as-a-service platform centralizes deliveries from multiple third-party services into one system, which also integrates online, mobile and phone orders, removing the hassle of various apps. Relay says it is a more predictable way for riders to earn money, since they offer an hourly wage.
Headquarters: New York, New York
HelloFresh customers can enjoy fresh meals based around high quality produce with a preparation time of 45 minutes or less. HelloFresh provides its customers with the ability to mix and match their ideal recipes based on their dietary restrictions or preferences, removing the added tasks of shopping for ingredients.
Headquarters: New York, New York
Hungryroot’s meal-kit delivery service provides customers across the country with simple, easy meals based around healthy vegetables and fresh produce. Hungryroot’s meals are designed to be quick to prepare, with many meals requiring a prep time of only seven minutes.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Instacart is a grocery delivery company that partners with several national and regional grocery stores to provide customers shopping options from their homes. Instacart users can build shopping lists on the company’s web platform and choose delivery times that suit them best, with the option to have groceries delivered in an hour.
Headquarters: New York, New York
Seeking to provide healthy meal options for younger individuals, Little Spoon is a food delivery service that ships organic meals, snacks and vitamins made for infants and children. The service offers products all under six dollars and has sent out over 17 million meals since its founding.
Headquarters: Pennsauken Township, New Jersey
Misfits Market is a food delivery service that ships U.S. customers local organic produce from partnered farms and other grocery stores that would normally go to waste. The service offers free membership and aims to be a cheaper alternative for purchasing organic produce in comparison to shopping in-store.
Headquarters: Birmingham, Alabama
Shipt is a delivery service offering same-day delivery for local grocery, household and various other products. Its services are available for up to 80 percent of households in over 5,000 U.S. cities. As of 2017, Shipt was acquired by Target for $550 million in cash. Since its acquisition, Shipt has now been used to provide same-day delivery to Target customers across the country, allowing flexibility and quick-substitution options for Target customers in the wake of recent supply chain disruptions.
Headquarters: Los Angeles, California
At a $5-per-month membership fee, Thrive Market allows customers to ship personalized organic and non-GMO grocery boxes to their homes. Thrive Market currently offers over 5,000 organic products for purchase and serves over one million total members. The service also offers an included program known as Thrive Gives, where with each membership purchased, Thrive Market also provides a free one-year membership to a student, teacher, veteran, first responder, nurse or family in need.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Starting under the name “UberFRESH” in 2014 and extending from its parent company, Uber Technologies Inc., Uber Eats uses its transportation services for delivering meals, groceries and other items from local participating restaurants and markets. Uber Eats remains one of the most popular food delivery services in the world, partnering with over 1,000 active grocery stores in the United States alone in 2021.
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
A subsidiary of Amazon, Amazon Fresh uses the same delivery technology as its parent company, but this time solely for food, drink and other household items. Amazon Fresh offers same-day delivery to U.S. and select worldwide Amazon Prime members for a variety of name-brand and Amazon-brand grocery products.
Headquarters: New York, New York
Serving roughly 336,000 customers as of 2021, Blue Apron provides fresh and sustainably sourced ingredients as well as instructions on how to use them to create full meals. The company offers plans for both couples and families, as well as unique add-ons like wine subscriptions and gift cards.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Cheetah is a food delivery company that aims to meet the specific needs of the restaurant industry, utilizing mobile technology to streamline ingredient ordering and back stocking. Cheetah’s client base includes thousands of restaurants throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, and its supplier network includes brands like General Mills, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Hidden Valley and others.
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
Crowd Cow provides its customers a direct way to purchase cuts of beef from local, small-scale ranches in their regions. Crowd Cow aims to combat the commercial cattle industry and promote sustainability by supporting ranches that don't rely on artificial hormones when raising cattle.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
DoorDash partners with local restaurants and national food chains to provide on-demand delivery to customers across the United States. In 2019, DoorDash acquired food delivery rival Caviar for $140 million in cash and stock. Caviar was known for delivering exclusive non-fast food options. The acquisition has allowed DoorDash to offer a wider variety of restaurants within its delivery app.
Headquarters: New York, New York
Formerly named Quinciple, Farm To People is a grocery and meal kit delivery company that provides customers with fresh, farm sourced and seasonal produce. At a weekly subscription price, Farm To People’s meal-kit delivery service is unique in that its ingredients aren't pre-portioned, providing customers with more creative leeway in the kitchen.
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
Fooda offers employers the ability to provide their employees with lunches and other meals delivered right to their workplace. By alerting employees each morning to meal options via email, Fooda has helped some of the biggest companies in the country feed their staff, with a client list including big names like Instagram and Coca-Cola.
Headquarters: Denver, Colorado
Formerly known as Oh My Green, Garten wants to ensure employees don't have to sacrifice a healthy diet while at their office. Garten connects with companies of all kinds to provide healthy snacks, beverages and meals. The company offers additional services like farm-to-table catering and meal kit boxes, supporting customers of all backgrounds in the journey to better eating.
Headquarters: Istanbul, Turkey
Originating from Turkey, Getir is a food and grocery delivery app that has established its services across multiple cities, including Boston, Chicago and New York. Getir has aimed to set itself apart from other delivery services by doing away with time-slot deliveries and offering instant delivery by processing an order as soon as a user puts it in.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Good Eggs is an organic grocery delivery company that offers fresh produce, meal kits, and same-day delivery. Good Eggs specifically seeks to team up with organic farms and companies local to the Bay Area, helping connect residents to resources within their own communities.
Headquarters: Chicago, Illinois
Home Chef delivers custom-made meal kits to areas in 98 percent of the United States, offering new recipes to choose from and receive each week. The service allows customers the ability to choose pre-portioned ingredient or no-prep meal options from six different recipe categories.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Imperfect Foods aims to curb food waste by offering a delivery program through which customers can order irregularly shaped or surplus food products at a lower price than Grade A produce. By reducing surplus waste and committing to sustainability, Imperfect Foods supports farmers and customers alike in its effort to make the food industry more eco-friendly.
Headquarters: Nashville, Tennessee
Porter Road Butcher provides a delivery service for customers to order local pasture-raised meat from Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. The company offers individual servings of various beef, chicken, pork and market products, as well as curated subscription boxes and cooking hardware.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Postmates is a popular restaurant delivery platform in the United States, and it also provides on-demand delivery services for users seeking groceries, beverages, retail items and other products. Its service connects with a network of local delivery workers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York and dozens of other U.S. cities to streamline restaurant delivery. Uber acquired Postmates for $2.65 billion in 2020 in an effort to expand its delivery services.
Headquarters: Needham, Massachusetts
Ideal for vegetarian and vegan customers, Purple Carrot is a subscription food service that delivers plant-based ingredient kits or prepared meal kits to homes. In 2019, Purple Carrot was acquired by e-grocer Oisix ra daichi in an opportunity to expand its services across Japan.