Entrepreneurs are by nature overly optimistic, which is a good thing. If they weren’t, many of the products and services people enjoy today wouldn’t exist, such as Good Uncle, the delivery-only restaurant that saves Syracuse University students from dining hall food.

This past semester, the startup made a radical shift in its business model in an attempt to pioneer the first ever made-for-delivery food menu. This change doesn’t warrant a negative reaction for customers, in fact, it puts the food-delivery service ahead of many others.

When Good Uncle launched at SU in 2016, it operated a kitchen in Syracuse to prepare food from New York City restaurants like Sticky’s Finger Joint and Joe’s Pizza. Now the company boasts its own menu of dishes that undergo the final steps of the cooking process in delivery trucks just before customers pick up their food. The trucks are outfitted with smart ovens and other appliances to cook the meals.

At first there were mixed reviews about the change, Founder Wiley Cerilli said.

“The people that had never eaten our food before loved it. The people that had, didn’t like it as much because their favorites were gone,” he said.

It’s not uncommon for customers to react negatively when companies change their offerings. Stijn M.J. van Osselaer, a professor of marketing at Cornell University, said customers can easily feel like they’re being taken advantage of by companies when products change.

“Consumers know that there’s companies that try to influence them all the time,” van Osselaer said.

But this doesn’t seem to be the case for Good Uncle’s recent transition. According to Cerilli, menu ratings are now better than ever. After hiring world-class food scientists to conduct research, the Good Uncle team is developing a way to apply its new cooking process to recipes from partner restaurants.

Food from restaurants isn’t cooked for delivery. It’s made to be consumed shortly after it’s been cooked. Cerilli and his team are optimizing their recipes for delivery by purposely undercooking the food in kitchens and conducting the final step of the cooking process in delivery trucks.

This new model fits into a future where storefronts and physical locations for restaurants matter far less than they do today. For the last decade, brick and mortar retail stores have been downsizing their physical footprints as consumers shift further into e-commerce. Food delivery is finally right in the middle of its digital transition thanks to mobile phones.

Good Uncle’s promise of a made-for-delivery menu could shake up the billion-dollar market for food delivery. Food is one of the largest segments of the coveted last mile delivery space, which is the final step in bringing online orders to consumers’ doorsteps.

Companies like Uber Eats, Grubhub, Postmates and DoorDash have all raised large sums of venture capital money to offer restaurants easy access to delivery. These startups mostly operate in large metropolitan areas such as New York City, San Francisco and Boston. Few have tried to tap into the college markets as aggressively as Good Uncle.

The only other competitor in the made-for-delivery space is Zume Pizza, California-based operator automated pizza delivery trucks. Its delivery fleet uses robots to prepare pizza orders as they’re being delivered to customers. Since 2015, the startup has raised more than $400 million in venture capital funding to expand its hybrid workforce of humans and robots, according to Crunchbase.

Cerilli said the company’s goal for 2020 is to be the fastest growing restaurant chain in the country. If that happens, it will be the first restaurant to do so without storefront and it could usher in a new era for food delivery where the cooking and transportation processes happen at the same time.

Who knows, maybe in another few years Good Uncle’s food could be delivered by autonomous vehicles and prepared solely by an autonomous system.

Daniel Strauss is a senior finance major and public communications minor. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at dstrauss@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @_thestrauss_.

Published on January 15, 2019 at 8:16 pm