From San Francisco to Stuttgart - DoorDash delivers in Europe

03-Jun-2022 - Germany

In Germany, there are more and more providers for ordering food on the Internet - giving customers a choice. The major US provider Doordash <US25809K1051> is now also entering the booming business. The San Francisco-based company, which is only eight years old, is coming to Europe for the first time - and is launching in Stuttgart.

Co-founder Andy Fang traveled to Swabia to announce the entry in person. "Stuttgart is kind of a test for us to see if there is appetite in Germany for DoorDash," he said Wednesday. "If we are successful in Stuttgart, the experience we gain here will serve us in other cities as well." Which these might be, he left discreetly open.

But Wang made it quite immodestly clear at the Neckar that his delivery service, with a home in California and operations in Australia, Canada and Japan, is acting as a global company. The from own view market-leading delivery platform in the USA had announced only one week ago to take over the Finnish offerer Wolt for approximately seven billion euro in shares. The latter is active in Berlin, among other places. DoorDash is thus expanding its territory by more than 20 countries. In Europe, the Dutch group Just Eat Takeaway, to which the brand Lieferando also belongs, has been particularly strong so far.

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Fang was tight-lipped about the billion-dollar deal in the home of Mercedes and Porsche, saying it had not yet been completed. The companies are currently continuing to work separately. The graduate of the elite U.S. university Stanford was also evasive about competitors such as Lieferando.

DoorDash wants to help merchants go online. Only 18.5 percent of restaurants in Germany are on an Internet delivery marketplace so far, Fang told us. The EU's largest economy is "a big open field" for his industry, he said. And Stuttgart? Simply an underserved market. In addition to food, flowers and alcohol products are to be delivered there.

The company is starting in the Baden-Württemberg capital with one of 30 courier drivers. "I want to clarify that we employ courier drivers full-time in Germany through an agency," Fang told Deutsche Presse-Agentur. "We provide them with training for safety, and they get the equipment they need for their job - helmets, gloves, winter jackets. They also get e-bikes."

The business of delivering ready-to-eat food and groceries is booming in these days of Corona and home offices. "Covid-19 has been kind of a time machine for us," Fang summed up. Behaviors that would otherwise have taken longer to develop accelerated, he felt.

For a long time, Lieferando had been virtually the only provider of restaurant deliveries in Germany. In the meantime, the picture has changed considerably, and the market is increasingly competitive: In addition to Wolt, the Berlin-based Delivery Hero group is also back on the domestic market under its Foodpanda brand and, by its own admission, also wants to get started in Stuttgart. Delivery Hero had only sold its entire German business in 2019.

Which dish is likely to be delivered particularly frequently at DoorDash, perhaps pizza? "We don't know yet. We're just starting here now," Fang said in the interview. "We're already excited to see what customers in Stuttgart want." The startup founder helped deliver in autumnal weather - and got lost in an apartment building on the way to the customer./cb/DP/jha (dpa)

Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.

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