The consumer goods and food delivery service Gopuff has expanded into a new sector with the launch of “Gopuff Kitchen,” which brings freshly cooked food to customers.
This new service, which was announced on Wednesday (July 21), will use mobile kitchens operating in tandem with the Philadelphia company’s micro-fulfillment centers, allowing customers to order meals alongside any other essentials and have them delivered in minutes for a flat $1.95 fee.
“Gopuff leverages both its own recipes and ingredients from local partners to offer a mix of healthy and indulgent menu items, including hot, freshly prepared pizza, chicken tenders, salads, fresh brewed coffee and matcha, breakfast sandwiches and more for breakfast, lunch, dinner and late-night,” the company said in the news release.
The company says Gopuff Kitchen uses a proprietary, completely electrical fleet and employs “clean cooking,” using no open flames, odors, propane gas or fryer, and no combustion in either cooking or climate control. In addition, Gopuff’s “innovative modular design” allows the kitchen to adapt menus and equipment according to the communities it serves.
So far, the new service has delivered hundreds of thousands of orders as part of a pilot program in a number of U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, Miami, Nashville, Phoenix and Austin, with plans to add more kitchens by the end of 2021.
The company says that “Gopuff Kitchen eliminates the need for customers to place multiple orders from different services, reducing the risk of delivery delays and food getting cold due to multiple stops.”
Last year, Gopuff acquired the app-only coffee shop Bandit, which was founded in 2019 by James Gallagher and Max Crowley. Crowley has since begun leading Gopuff’s expansion plans, including Gopuff Kitchen.
More recently, Gopuff acquired Liquor Barn, an independent chain out of Kentucky that sells beer, wine and liquor as part of an initiative to expand its services in the Bluegrass State.
Around the same time, the company purchased San Francisco’s rideOS, which builds technology for routing and dispatch services. Gopuff said it hopes to use the acquisition to power multimodal deliveries and make delivery times shorter