Food delivery can approach grocery-store economics

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 27:46

   Okay, well, you need to do e-commerce for online food delivery, which means I need warehouses like Amazon style, except they're not just for logistics. It's not just picking, packing, sorting, and then putting in a car. You also have to have manufacturing there too. Manufacturing, also known as a restaurant. People don't think of that, but you go to the labor statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics, restaurants are manufacturers, okay?

2. 28:12

   So you have to have manufacturing and logistics infrastructure in the same place. That's real estate. Then you actually have to have automated production. That's the manufacturing. So robotic, food robots, essentially. Food robotics. and then you need to have robotic hurriers and you do those three things and then all of a sudden you are getting super high quality meals everything you could ever imagine we call it the internet food court and it gets to with the price of going to the grocery store so you go okay nice that's a nice story then you go well in 20 years will robotics i start with a really easy question in 20 years will people be cooking food regularly and there will be a suite of robotics that basically will make higher quality meals uh like there's just you'll be doing a better job than any of us could do

3. 29:16

   and i think most people especially those in the robotics space we like of course that's obvious that that's going to happen and you're like in 20 years are we going to have i call them autonomous burritos like boxes on wheels that hold food at temperature that come to your house yes everybody will say yes absolutely we see waymos cruising around all the already we just need a very cheap much cheaper version of that so 20 years is like the easy one then you go well what about what about 10 what about seven what about five and so that's when you're bending you're bending reality you're you're bending it towards now so everybody would agree that this is going to happen and now it's about when and who and then you say lfg now sometimes you're a little bit early and i would say on the we were a bit early on cloud kitchens but but you build

4. 30:14

   those bricks all those things i talked about we have hundreds of facilities in 30 countries many hundreds of facilities in 30 countries. Restaurants, because the online delivery market keeps growing, the restaurants are doing better and better. So, success is happening, right? Well, restaurant world has high churn. Your churn starts coming down because volume's going up. We have applications that guarantee volume into these restaurants so that we can have successful tenants, which means I'm a successful real estate guy from a business model perspective. The robotics start to work.

5. 30:51

   You know, we're getting a manufacturing line for our robots up in Q4. So, like, the pieces start to come together. You're like, production is now 50% cheaper. Once we get the couriers, the robotic couriers, you go from $12 a drop for each meal to $0.50 a dollar of distribution cost per meal. And now you're taking, okay, $6 out in labor. you're taking, let's call it $10 or $11 out on the courier on the real estate because you're going to get higher volume because you're driving the prices down. You probably save a few bucks, let's call it two or three bucks on occupancy per meal. And all of a sudden you've got like a eight or $10 meal that's delivered to you all in. Plus you don't have to recruit drivers, you know and get shoplifted that's true so that's right you can't shoplift a rope a robotic career

6. 32:00

   yeah yes so we should need to stop using this term so you're so wrong okay hundred facilities in 30 countries thousands of employees you know over eight year period and you're in stealth