The difference is that conventional food delivery is a restaurant hiring teenagers to deliver and pays them cash. There's basically zero initial investment involved other than a couple of bikes and the owner makes a profit off every delivery.

Doordash & co have raised millions of investor money which not only do they have to pay back but also provide unrealistic returns, which isn't really possible with such a physical service where expenses and profits scale mostly linearly (see WeWork which promised tech-company-style returns despite being a physical business and how it all ended).

Speaking of WeWork, the biggest investor behind REEF, one of the cloud kitchen vendors expanding in 2019? SoftBank. https://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/news/2019/06/26/how...

I'm not defending Doordash here, I'm just saying that the general concept of running a space optimized for cooking food for delivery is solid, could easily be profitable, and mostly already exists in the form of existing restaurants that are optimized for delivery (like pizza places that don't even have tables). I live in Manhattan and the amount of food being ordered in every day is unreal. Shockingly even the Taco Bell near me does more volume in delivery than in eat-in or to-go -- and they don't even run any delivery services themselves! It's all third party!