Pizza Might Be the Canary in the Coal Mine

Food delivery businesses like DoorDash are your classic marketplace model – with a middleman (DoorDash) taking a hefty cut of the transaction for their matchmaking service. A 10-person Bay Area startup, Bites, is challenging this model with its AI-native approach. Connect to the apps and APIs the restaurant already uses to get the menu, expose it to your AI agent inside ChatGPT for ordering, and build on two decades of marketing and consumer education your predecessors have done (and a global pandemic accelerated), and you can charge a flat $1 per order where DoorDash takes 15 to 30 percent. The Verge’s test pizza came to $56.73 through ChatGPT and $70.29 on DoorDash. Meanwhile, DoorDash loses its $1bn/year ad business and its ability to upsell you to that nice bottle of wine.