In the late 2010s, American society became mildly obsessed with the idea of "the disruptor." Take a look at this chart from Google:
In hindsight, it makes sense. The world did feel ripe for disruption back then. For the first time, the vast majority of people owned smartphones. Amazon and Uber were establishing the on-demand economy. Gen Z was emerging as a force to be reckoned with. There was a sense that whoever could connect the dots could be the next big thing.
Then came the pandemic, which you might argue was the ultimate disruptor. Since then, we’ve talked less about disrupting and more about adapting to the new world the pandemic created.
But before that, people were very into the idea of disruptors, including this publication. For several years, we ran a feature called The Disruptors that highlighted people, companies and trends that we thought would reshape the restaurant business in the future.
We got a lot of things right. We were on top of automation and third-party delivery well before they became mainstream, and we rightly called out the impact private equity would have on the business.
But there were also plenty of would-be disruptors that fizzled, and for reasons that are enlightening to look back on. The big lesson: It’s very difficult to reinvent the restaurant, a complex, competitive and human-centric business that has long been resistant to technology.
That hasn't stopped people from trying. Here are four disruptors that didn’t pan out.
Amazon
To be fair, Amazon disrupted everything. But its impact on the restaurant business could have been a lot bigger.
In 2015, the ecommerce giant launched Amazon Restaurants, a food delivery service that competed with Uber Eats and Grubhub. It was available in about 200 U.S. cities, and Prime members could get free delivery, a unique benefit at the time.
Then, in a rare about-face, Amazon shut down the Restaurants business in June 2019. The fast-growing food delivery game had proven too competitive, and Amazon said it wanted to focus more on grocery delivery following its acquisition of Whole Foods. One wonders what might have happened if it had hung on for another year.
The company didn’t exit food delivery entirely, and it still looms as a possible re-entrant into the business. In 2019, it made a big investment in the British delivery service Deliveroo and more recently took a stake in Grubhub.
But up until now, the restaurant delivery disruption has come from elsewhere.
Ghost kitchens
Speaking of delivery, ghost kitchens were supposed to transform how we interacted with restaurants. The idea was that these small, delivery-only outlets would allow restaurants to open closer to the end consumer without the costs of a traditional brick-and-mortar, making food delivery faster and more affordable.
The pandemic brought ghost kitchens into the mainstream as more people began ordering delivery. But they ran into trouble almost as soon as COVID restrictions were lifted. Turns out it is pretty hard for a restaurant to survive on delivery alone in a normal environment. Soon, ghost kitchens began adding storefronts and dining areas in hopes of attracting walk-ins, effectively reverting back into regular old restaurants.
There are still some pure-play ghost kitchen operators out there, most notably CloudKitchens, which seems to be growing. But most of the others have shut down or pivoted to something else.
In-home restaurants
What if aspiring chefs could turn their home kitchens into restaurants? That was a question being addressed by startups like Umi Kitchen, Foodnome and Cook Connect as far back as 2016.
The apps connected consumers to a network of local cooks who sold small-batch meals out of their homes. In theory, they would allow anyone with a kitchen to start a restaurant, which could be bad news for actual restaurants.
However, the idea has never truly taken off, in large part because of all the red tape that comes with selling food out of one’s home. In most states, cottage food laws typically allow for the sale of baked goods and packaged items from the home, but not freshly cooked meals.
There has been some progress on that front, however: In 2019, California created a new business category called the Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation, or MEHKO, that made in-home restaurants possible. When Riverside began issuing permits, it reportedly saw an “explosion” of MEHKOs. And now restaurant-rich LA County has adopted the rule.
Zume Pizza
The Silicon Valley startup attracted a lot of attention with its automated pizza delivery concept, which included trucks filled with ovens that cooked pies on the go.
Like ghost kitchens, Zume said it could get people their food faster and hotter. The idea was intriguing enough to net a $375 million investment from SoftBank and a reported valuation of $4 billion.
But the business had problems. Melted cheese would reportedly slide off the pizzas as they shifted around in the back of the moving truck. And while the tech was cool, consumers weren’t really interested in the product: Zume generated just $1 million in revenue in 2019, according to Bloomberg.
The company shut down its pizza business in 2020 and then went away completely in 2023 after a few failed pivots.
Zume wasn’t the only company to try cooking on the go. Wonder, the food hall/delivery concept created by Marc Lore, also got its start with a fleet of mobile kitchens that would finish food in customers’ driveways. It later abandoned that idea, in part because it was expensive to park all those delivery vans.