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Good morning,

HNGRY got a SB debrief on Gopuff’s Quartertime Show from Head of Brand Marketing Jessica Luria. The results were impressive, with over 4mm views of its halftime show within the first 24hrs across Gopuff and Lil Dicky's social channels. The strategy cleverly tapped into the “second screen” trend of people checking Twitter while watching the game, forgoing any traditional ad spend, making the transition towards viewers using its app to instantly order snacks a natural one.

This year, the top ordered items were frozen products like deep dish pizzas. Alcohol and champagne peaked between 6-7pm ET as the game was kicking off, with LA ordering more alcohol than Cincinnati. On Monday, the platform saw a 31% WoW increase in hangover remedies like Liquid IV. Snacks still topped alcohol, with spicy flavor Doritos, Lays, and Ruffles leading the pack.

While Luria says it was a lot more challenging to coordinate a quartertime show vs. buying a 30-second slot, it was well worth the effort... Gopuff may have just invented an entirely new show of its own.

💨💨💨


-n3wb 🍕



Stellar Pizza Leverages Robotics To Build The "In-N-Out" Of Pizza
 
The pizza above is a labor of love from 24 SpaceX engineers in Los Angeles that have quietly been building an end-to-end robotic pizza concept called Stellar Pizza over the past two years. This week, HNGRY dives deep into its product and unit economics, which boast 2x the four-wall EBITDA margins of a typical Domino's location thanks to its drastic reduction in labor. Unlike Zume and other ill-fated robotic restaurant attempts whose brands led with tech, Stellar wants to become the "In-N-Out Burger of pizza."
Read the full article (Membership required)
DoorDash released its Q4 earnings this week, highlighting that 14% of its 25mm MAUs ordered from a non-restaurant merchant, up 2% from Q3. In 2021, it doubled supply of these types of merchants. It also announced an Instacart-like convenience partnership with Albertsons to curate 6k SKUs in 330 stores across 20 cities via brands like "Albertsons Rapid Grocery" and "Safeway Rapid Grocery" on its marketplace. DoorDash has already unbundled other aisles and sections into various listings such as "Albertsons Deli" and "Florals & Gifts by Albertsons." 

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High-end UK grocer Waitrose, which launched its e-commerce business in partnership with Ocado 20 years ago, is teaming up with Deliveroo to manage dark stores that deliver 1,000+ of its private label SKUs in 10 minutes. The grocer left Ocado in 2020, signing a two-year agreement last year with Deliveroo to fulfill online grocery orders from its stores. $ROO entered a similar agreement with Morrison’s for its “Hop” program after it too left Ocado’s monolithic warehouses in 2019. Dark stores as a service for large retailers? Now that could be something…

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Location analytics platform Placer.ai recently released an interesting report on Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods traffic, showing a decline in cross-shopping between the two banners. This reinforces Whole Foods’ higher-end positioning vs. Amazon Fresh’s value play. Data shows December Whole Foods’ visits recovering to 5.2% below pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, Fresh gradually increased traffic in each of its stores from Q2 to Q4 last year while decreasing its True Trade Area (how far most customers travel to shop at a store).

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This week, automated fast casual makeline startup Hyphen announced a $24mm Series A led by Tiger Global with participation from co-founders of Apollo and Toast. HNGRY is also honored to participate in the round as an angel– I have been following the startup's journey since it began as an automated smoothie truck called Ono Blends, pivoting to what I now call the "AWS of restaurant labor" as it sells its automation to QSR and fast casual brands on a per-bowl basis. Check out my original coverage from last August below, sans paywall.

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