You Op to Know: Business columnist discusses Good Uncle’s ambitious vision

Welcome to You Op to Know, The Daily Orange Opinion section’s weekly podcast.  

This week, Assistant Editorial Editor Michael Sessa and Business columnist Daniel Strauss discuss Good Uncle’s ambitious vision for their restaurant-delivery startup.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to submit a letter to the editor at opinion@dailyorange.com.

TRANSCRIPT

MICHAEL SESSA: Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s addition of You Op To Know, The Daily Orange’s Opinion podcast. I’m your host and co-producer Michael Sessa and I’m joined by our Business columnist Daniel Strauss.

DANIEL STRAUSS: Thanks for having me Michael.

SESSA: So tonight we’re going to talk about Good Uncle and their unique business model, as well as the plans they have for the future of food in Syracuse. So you write columns about business for us. What strikes you as different about the way Good Uncle does business?

STRAUSS: That’s a really good question. So I think there’s a lot of, like, food delivery startups like Grubhub, DoorDash, Postmates, Uber Eats, and basically what all of these companies have in common is that they’re like the intermediary between the restaurants and the end customer. So last mile delivery is basically where Good Uncle and these companies operate. So it’s essentially the last mile between getting any sort of online order — any sort of package or delivery — to the customer. So what’s unique about Good Uncle, is, they’ve essentially, with their new menu, cut out the intermediary. So they no longer, right now, are working with partner restaurants — they do plan to in the future. What’s interesting to me is they have way more quality control because they’re actually doing the cooking. So Grubhub has no control over quality. They’re simply just having their drivers pick up food from the restaurants and bring it to the end customer. But Good Uncle exerts total control of the system. So whatever the restaurants are that they partner with — the recipes, how it’s being cooked, where it’s being cooked and when it’s being cooked now, with the new menu. So that’s what’s interesting to me about, kind of, their newer business model in comparison to things like Grubhub and DoorDash.

SESSA: So you got to talk to Good Uncle’s CEO, and he had said that it wasn’t necessarily a hit when they made those changes.

STRAUSS: Yeah. So that was actually interesting. So I was initially interested in the story because I thought it was going to be a lot of, you know, people saying ‘I don’t like the food’ and ‘the ratings are going down.’ Because a lot of people loved that they could get Joe’s Pizza, Sticky’s tenders, the burritos, the sandwiches, you know, the New York style food, delivered right to their door. So when they did make the transition over to this new menu that was, kind of, being catered by them I figured it would be a big hit to their business. But conversely, when I talked to Wiley, he said that, you know, actually that at first they saw a little bit of a dip in their ratings because they were transitioning to the new model.They saw some people that had initially used the service that didn’t like the new kind of platform. But people that hadn’t used the service before apparently had really positive feedback, really positive reviews, and now, according to Wiley, the ratings are higher than ever. So, I think that all it really comes down to for Good Uncle is execution. So they have this really new, innovative menu so it’ll be really telling to see when they bring on partners like Sticky’s Tenders, Joe’s pizza — they will be back on the platform in the fall, he said, fall of 2019. So they are going to be using this new kind of cooking style for this — so cooking, you know, the last section of the cooking process, will happen in the truck. So it’ll be really telling to see if they can still control quality with recipes that aren’t their own.

SESSA: So are there any other changes he talked about?

STRAUSS: That was the main thing, was kind of the made-for-delivery restaurant menu because he talked about — food made in restaurants is not made for delivery — it’s made to be consumed very shortly after it’s cooked. So ordering food from a restaurant isn’t really the optimal customer experience, which is a really great point that he made. So he wanted to create a menu with his team that was basically made to be partially cooked on the way to you. So there’s very few companies that are doing something similar. The only other company that does it is a company called Zume Pizza, which basically operates a fleet of autonomous trucks — the trucks aren’t autonomous, but in the back of the trucks, there’s, like, autonomous robots that are helping to prepare pizza.

SESSA: That’s awesome.

STRAUSS: Yeah, so they only do a fleet of pizza tricks right now. But they’re basically kind of positioning themselves as the company that is going to be able to provide, you know, I guess you could say, an autonomous workforce for food delivery, so they could expand to many other areas. But that’s really the biggest thing. And then I think for Good Uncle’s business in particular, Wiley did talk about wanting to be the fastest growing restaurant chain in the United States, which seems really ambitious. So I would imagine in the next couple of months we’ll probably see some big announcements from the company — maybe a big fundraising round. They’ve only raised about $2.2 million so far, but if they want to expand to a couple hundred locations, they’re going to need a lot of money to do that, especially because they outfit their own custom trucks, they have this big infrastructure they need to provide, and then they are hiring pretty aggressively. They’ve hired some Michelin Star chefs, they’ve hired some food scientists and stuff, so definitely going to need a lot of capital to expand. So we’ll see.

SESSA: Do you think they can get there?

STRAUSS: Yeah. I think the business has a ton of upside. But like I said, I really think for them it comes down to execution. Because they have to — it’s a great thing to, as company, be able to control the quality from end to end, but it’s also a lot of responsibility. So like I said, some people that did have the service prior to the menu change, they didn’t like the food as much because their favorites were gone. And also, Good Uncle was trying this new model, so that quality probably wasn’t as high. So I think that for them it’s really a big thing on execution. They have to really prefect the process of, you know, cooking the food in the truck or else I do think that when they do launch at scale, it could be, kind of very sloppy if it’s not done really well.

SESSA: Cool. Thanks for joining us.

STRAUSS: Yeah. No problem. Thanks for having me.

SESSA: Stay tuned for next week’s edition of the podcast. And, as always, if you have any questions or comments, you can hit us up at opinion@dailyorange.com or send us a letter for the editor. We’ll talk to you next week!