Grubhub nearly killed off Seamless years ago. Its NYC-based owners are reviving it
Restaurant delivery in New York is not like restaurant delivery in any other part of the country. The city has a long history with food delivery thanks to its dense population and copious restaurants (roughly 25,000 at last count). It even had its own delivery brand, Seamless, launched over a quarter-century ago as SeamlessWeb in the city. Now, after a brief fall from public view, Seamless is back in New York.
Seamless has operated under the thumb of a much larger brand for years. It merged with Grubhub in 2013, but retained its own branding in the biggest and arguably most important delivery market in the country. But when Grubhub got a new, foreign owner in 2020—Amsterdam-based Just Eat Takeaway (JET)—its new leaders moved to more or less erase Seamless’s branding. Grubhub would benefit from optimized marketing and streamline network effects, JET’s CEO said.
Just as pandemic shutdowns boosted the delivery business, Grubhub effectively ditched a brand that appealed to its largest market, opening the door to eager competition from national brands like Uber Eats and DoorDash.
In hindsight, this was a mistake, one that Grubhub’s new, New York City-based owners want to correct. Wonder, the so-called mealtime superapp led by serial entrepreneur Marc Lore, bought Grubhub for $650 million in January. Lore hasn’t offered many details about Grubhub’s future, but it clearly sees value in the New York market.
“It’s interesting to think that there would be nostalgia around one of these digital-first delivery brands,” says Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “I think people might be happy to hear that this brand is back and look at it as bringing back—and reconnecting with—an old friend.”
If that friend were a person, they’re old enough to order a cocktail. Seamless debuted in New York in 1999, well over a decade before upstart competitors would challenge its dominance. (At the time, two of DoorDash’s three founders were under age 10.) Back then, orders placed online often arrived at restaurants by fax, an almost quaint precursor to the high-tech networks that route these orders today.
Now, the stakes are even higher. Grubhub’s share of the restaurant delivery market has fallen to a distant third behind DoorDash and Uber Eats. Per recent reporting in Bloomberg, Grubhub controls just 5% of the delivery market nationwide, according to data from Bloomberg Second Measure. In New York, Bloomberg reports, numbers from YipitData suggest that Grubhub controls about a fifth of the delivery market. In an interview, Grubhub CEO Howard Migdal disputed this, saying Grubhub’s data shows it controls a “significantly higher” portion.
Even with a slight tailwind, reviving the legacy brand will take work. The most important thing for Grubhub to do, Calkins says, is to highlight what makes Seamless different.
“There is something about being a local brand, a New York brand, that could be a differentiator,” he says.
That seems to be Grubhub’s plan. In a statement, the company praised Seamless for “consistently speaking to and delivering on the nuances of living in the city that only New Yorkers could appreciate”—a.k.a. the type of if-you-know-you-know nod that plays well in local ads plastered on bus shelters and inside subway cars.
Of course, getting New Yorkers’ attention is just part of the contest. “The challenge then,” Calkins says, “is you have to get people to care.”