Amazon sees a future in online food delivery service

Fourth region in 3 months’ time

Baltimore is Amazon’s fourth region to get a restaurant meal home delivery service, following Seattle (September), Portland (October) and Los Angeles (November). “Baltimore’s vibrant mix of neighborhoods has created an equally vibrant food scene,” said Gus Lopez, general manager, Amazon Restaurants. “We’re excited to offer Amazon Prime customers a fast and convenient way to enjoy some of the city’s best restaurants without having to drive or take a water taxi.”

About a dozen postal codes in and around Baltimore will be able to enjoy Amazon’ service. Prior to placing an order, customers will be able to use the Prime Now app or its website to verify whether their area is able to get restaurant meals home delivered, which restaurants are part of the network and what they have to offer. Some 60 restaurants, ranging from pizzerias to grill restaurants and vegetarian restaurants, have already joined the service. “We will expand the number of restaurants over the coming few weeks”, Lopez promises. Across all 4 regions, Amazon already has about 100,000 restaurants in its service.

Members only

The service, which is free for a restricted period of time, is only available to Prime Now members, who have paid 99 dollars per year to assure speedy deliveries. Those can range from a maximum of 2 days (for some 20 million items), a maximum of 1 day for 16 metropolitan areas (for about 1 million items) and even within 2 hours for several major cities (for tens of thousands of items).

Amazon seeks to make its Prime Now proposal even more alluring by adding in this restaurant home delivery service to it. The goal is to get this service into every area where it has Prime Now on offer. Not only will this make the subscription more attractive to customers, it also means the world’s largest internet department store can enter the ever-expansive online food delivery market. Companies like Deliveroo, Just Eat, GrubHub and Delivery Hero (to name but a few) are hereby warned.