When Travis Kalanick showed up at the Food on Demand conference last May, tech and restaurant industry insiders couldn’t believe it.
After all, the Uber founder has earned an almost Howard Hughes-like reputation for secrecy over the past decade, publicly disparaging himself over the years while journalists and internet trolls sought digital breadcrumbs about what he was up to with CloudKitchens, the business he quietly built into a massive black kitchen/ghost kitchen network.
But unlike the aerospace and film executive who spent his days shuttling between test rooms and plane crashes, Kalanick made it clear on stage in Las Vegas last month that he was busy building a new business empire focused on reimagining the world of restaurants and food delivery.
“Can you do in the kitchen what Uber does in the car?” he asked. From there, Kalanick painted a vision of how the companies he would bring together under his holding company City Storage Systems would do things differently. He suggested the sum of his companies that he has collected – such as shared/dark kitchens (CloudKitchens), Point of Sale software (Otter), and restaurant automation (Lab37) – could enable a more efficient way of doing business than the disorganized, expensive, and money-laden environment that the restaurant and food delivery business has evolved into over the past decade.
It was during his speech that Kalanick talked about the idea of an ‘Intenet Food Court,’ where customers can have a personalized experience and order any type of food within 15 minutes. In order to realize that vision, Kalanick said that food and goods production will need to be mechanized, and his company is building the necessary infrastructure under City Storage Systems to deliver that.
“We paint where everything goes, but there is a road that gets there and we call it infrastructure for better food,” he continued. “That’s my company’s job.”
Kalanick’s reference to the concept of an internet or digital food court was not the first signal from him or his company about the concept. In fact, in 2020, the company launched what it described as an online food platform in the LA market, where it will bring together all the food operators in the Koreatown area and provide orders for multiple tenants. They even have a website URL, Internetfoodcourt.co. However, as of April 2020, the site was dead, and CloudKitchens was abandoning its online presence for the name.
However, in March of this year, the company started talking about digital food courts again. That month, it posted a story on its blog about the launch of a digital food court called Picnic in Chicago. The location, which was called Avondale Food Pickup before it was renamed Picnic, is unveiling what the post described as a new digital platform that will enable customers to order food on a new website (picnicfood.com) or in person through a kiosk or human employee and pick up the food using a pickup locker.
The take-out kiosk can be seen below:
The Picnic’s website indicates that you can request delivery or pickup, and currently the only pickup location is a Chicago address in Avondale, and a Google search appears to indicate that this was the first and only time Kalanick’s company used the Picnic logo and digital food hall concept as of 2020.
Then earlier this week, what appears to be another version of the same company Picnic (same brand, different website) appeared on LinkedIn and talked about a new platform concept in the Los Angeles market. The tone? A ‘digital food hall’ and multi-brand free food delivery to various business or multi-family residential locations. The concept, explained in the video below, is actually bulk orders to various office buildings, schools, and wherever hungry people gather each day.
According to the explainer video and website, “activating” Picnic begins with a local manager or employee/resident applying to be a Picnic drop-off point. Once accepted, Picnic will place what it describes as a Picnic “shelf” in the area where different foods are placed during delivery.
This new Picnic does not state anywhere on its website or LinkedIn that it is part of the City Storage Systems network. The website’s FAQ describes the company as the product of co-workers in the California market who “realized it was nearly impossible to find consistent lunch options with variety,” and when Spoon reached someone at the number found on the company’s LinkedIn page, the person told us the company was not related to CloudKitchens or City Storage Systems.
But we’re sure it’s for a few obvious reasons: Not only does it use the same logo as the CloudKitchens Picnic offered in Chicago, but the location’s address at 777 S Figueroa in Los Angeles is listed in many places as the same address as City Storage Systems.
Which, of course, raises all kinds of questions. For example, will this version of Picnic — a platform for bulk-ordered food delivery to workplaces and multifamily residences — be the next big idea from Kalanick’s company? And does this mean that the company is building its own delivery network? And will Kalanick & Co roll out a digital food court and automated shopping centers (like the one at Picnic Chicago) to its other ghost kitchen locations around the country?
The new delivery network would certainly be an interesting step for the founder who is responsible for not only changing personal transportation with Uber and building the infrastructure for large third-party food delivery companies like UberEats.
Finally, it must also be asked: Why a picnic? There are already other Picnics in the food tech space, including Picnic in Seattle that makes pizza robots, and a grocery tech startup called Picnic out of The Netherlands. It seems like an interesting move, especially since the US Trademark office has granted a trademark to Seattle-based Picnic (their company name is Picnic Works) to use the word Picnic.
If you have insights or leads on what else City Storage Systems plans to do with its Picnic platform (be it a one-stop online food hall concept or a bulk delivery concept), drop us a line.