Happy Thanksgiving!
The next Chipotle (of pizza)?
I'm only casually familiar with Mod Pizza, but they are supposed to pizza what CMG did to burritos. MOD has submitted a confidential draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the SEC. The company did not provide any further details on its IPO. Mod's opened its 500th store despite challenges in 2020 when it posted a 5% decline in systemwide sales. Mod is a franchised fast-casual pizza chain, which was founded in 2008. In 2019, the company raised $160 million and set a goal to increase its store count to 1,000 locations by 2024. Unit growth slowed to 22 net new locations in 2020 compared to 64 in 2019. Like every restaurant company, investments in online channels helped the company during the pandemic. Mod initially began expanding its digital offerings in 2019, launching its Mod Rewards program in March 2019, partnering with DoorDash. These initiatives resulted in a growth of 135% digital sales in 2020, now 40% of sales during 2020. The company also benefited from growth in its loyalty program, which surpassed 2 million members. Eight restaurant chains, including Mod, have now gone public or have announced intentions to go public in 2021.
More on MOD at a later date.
An inferior Technology stack
The knock-on GRUB when it was a stand-alone publically traded company was the inferior technology, which is why it lost the battle to DASH. Now the knock-on Just Eat is that they even didn't finish the Just Eat integration from a back-office perspective, when they bought GRUB. It now looked like the GRUB's new owner is upgrading that part of the story. Grubhub is partnering with Deliverect, an online ordering platform that works with over 12,000 restaurants in 30 markets, to integrate orders on the third-party delivery app directly into restaurant point-of-sale systems. The integration makes it easier for operators to sync and manage menus directly from their POS. Deliverect CEO Zhong Xu said that Deliverect's tools provide restaurants with insights into best-performing menu items and help operators reduce food waste. Deliverect already integrated Uber Eats, Deliveroo, DoorDash, and other providers into restaurant POS systems and raised $65 million in April after processing 30 million delivery orders.
