El Pollo Loco stated that it will be the first nationwide catering company to experiment with drone delivery.
On June 24, the Costa Mesa restaurant chain, known for its fire-grilled chicken, will test “Air Loco”, which is a drone delivery service from the restaurant kitchen to the customer’s backyard.
As more people order food during the pandemic, restaurants are looking for other cheaper and more efficient ways to deliver food to customers’ homes. In 2016, Amazon was one of the first companies to discuss the use of autopilots to deliver packages to customers’ doorsteps in 30 minutes or less. But Amazon Prime Air has not yet started and is widely used.
With the Federal Aviation Administration recently approved regulations to provide delivery services to people, it is expected that more and more drones will fly into the sky to provide restaurants and other types of delivery services.
For El Pollo Loco, delivery services have become an important part of its business during the pandemic, an increase of 250% over last year, while drone services are a way to avoid traditional delivery services such as Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, etc. How to charge service fees. Others charge up to 30% of transaction fees. This is also a way to deliver more products faster and is expected to be more cost-effective and convenient for customers.
Andy Rebhun, vice president and digital division of El Pollo Loco, said: “We want to take the lead in providing an unforgettable experience to our customers in a cost-effective, fun and reliable way that a restaurant brand has never tried before.” The official said in an email.
Other restaurants have tested drone deliveries to designated pick-up locations, such as parking lots, where delivery vehicles will pick up the items from the drop-off location and deliver them to customers’ homes for the final stop. Rebhun said that El Pollo Loco hopes to take steps to deliver items directly to customers’ backyards or front doors.
He said: “I believe drone delivery is one of the more sustainable and cost-effective mechanisms for food delivery in the future.” “I believe there will be a bifurcated delivery model in the future, and companies will choose the most effective and profitable The mechanism with the highest rate of operation.”
El Pollo Loco is working on a pilot with Flytrex, a drone startup in Tel Aviv, which manufactures and operates autonomous drones that fly at 32 miles per hour and uses a wire release mechanism to gently lower food from 80 feet Order.
The drone used for this service is also equipped with a fixed delivery box that keeps the order intact, which means that the customer will receive the order wrapped in El Pollo Loco’s new special packaging-used to keep food more Long time-delivery arrives faster than traditional packaging.
Rebhun said that when the order leaves the restaurant, the food will be loaded onto the Air Loco drone, and once it takes off, it will rise to about 200 feet and start flying to its destination. The drone can carry up to 6.6 pounds of food. Once the food is dropped from the 80-foot-long wire, the tamper-proof sealed delivery bag is removed from the crane and customers can retrieve their food.
The company said that El Pollo Loco will start pilot projects in 10 restaurants, which will be selected in the next 45 to 60 days. After the test is completed, it plans to expand it to more of the 480 restaurants based on demand and FAA regulatory approval. The company said that during the pilot period, some of the Loco Rewards members of El Pollo Loco in Southern California will be surprised by one of the first flights.
Analysts predict that even if restaurants reopen their traditional full-capacity catering services, online ordering will continue to grow this year. The global online food delivery market is expected to grow from USD 115.07 billion in 2020 to USD 126.91 billion in 2021.
In the past five years, online food ordering and restaurant delivery have grown by 20%, and are expected to account for about 40% of all restaurant sales by 2025.
Flytrex and Walmart launched a pilot program in Fayetteville, North Carolina to provide a selection of groceries and household necessities. It also offers Starbucks drinks and pastries.
Earlier this year, Pizza Hut Israel stated that it would deploy drones to deliver pizza. But the company said that instead of delivering directly to the customer’s home, the drone will place the order in a government-approved landing area (such as a parking lot), and then the driver will complete the last stop of the delivery there.
Francesca Billington is a general assignment reporter for dot.LA. She has previously reported for KCRW, Santa Monica Daily and New Jersey local publications. Before joining dot.LA, she worked as a communications researcher at the Environmental Science Research Center in Sri Lanka. She graduated from Princeton in 2019 with a degree in anthropology.
Daria Shapovalova and Natalia Modenova want to sell you clothes, but not the ones hanging in your closet.
Their virtual clothing can be tailored to your next Instagram post, making followers think that you spent thousands of dollars on a dress designed by Alexander McQueen’s nephew.
Their Los Angeles-based digital fashion start-up, DressX, is building a library of designer dresses, sweatshirts and wallets that are far less expensive than the real ones. And, they say, there are no environmental costs for production, transportation, and waste.
Shopovalova, the co-founder of DressX, said: “This is for content creators who don’t want to spend more money on clothes.” “They can just use the camera to shoot pre-recorded videos of Stories and TikTok.”
After scrolling through the clothing page, customers can check out with a credit card, upload a photo of themselves, and make any special requests.
Then, the DressX team started work to superimpose digital clothing on the customer’s photo. One day later, the final image is emailed to the user along with the project files.
Once the startup’s mobile app goes live later this month, users can pay a monthly subscription fee to access certain clothing items as augmented reality filters. Think of it as a high-fashion and stylish Snapchat filter, where content creators can shoot YouTube videos or Instagram stories while wearing virtual clothing.
On Tuesday, Dresx completed a $2 million seed round of financing to launch the platform and establish its NFT market.
Before COVID-19, the DressX executive team opened a pop-up showroom called More Dash in Los Angeles, where customers can wear rented clothing to film digital content. They transitioned to the Internet in August last year and began marketing to millennials and Gen Z consumers to resist the fast fashion industry.
“Imagine you are 15 years old and you don’t have enough money to buy the clothes you want,” Shopovalova said. “In digital fashion, you can wear almost anything.”
The company now lists the clothing and accessories of more than 100 3D and traditional fashion designers, including Ukrainian Paska and footwear brand Buffalo London. 12% to 30% of each sale will be returned to the designer, excluding DressX’s own internally designed clothing.
There is a $25 sweatshirt printed with paintings by Paul Cezanne and a $100 interactive haute couture dress, programmed with Google technology. In April of this year, DressX hosted an online fashion show with designer Alexander McQueen’s nephew Gary James McQueen, who only sold clothes digitally.
“This breaks the boundaries of the existing fashion industry,” said Shapovalova, a former fashion TV host who helped launch Ukrainian Fashion Week.
Next year, she said that the company’s goal is to introduce new features that will allow users to wear DressX clothes on Zoom or Google Meet.
The seed round was led by the Artemis Fund and Alpha Edison. The company said that the additional funding came from Unlock Venture Partners, One Way Ventures, Signal Peak Ventures, TLF Ventures, Startup Mavericks and angel investors from the fashion, technology and blockchain industries.
Francesca Billington is a general assignment reporter for dot.LA. She has previously reported for KCRW, Santa Monica Daily and New Jersey local publications. Before joining dot.LA, she worked as a communications researcher at the Environmental Science Research Center in Sri Lanka. She graduated from Princeton in 2019 with a degree in anthropology.
Sam is mainly responsible for dot.LA’s entertainment and media business. Previously, he was a Marjorie Deane Fellow of The Economist, writing for the commercial and financial sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now a Disney streaming service). He holds an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson, an MPP from the University of California, Los Angeles, Ruskin, and a Bachelor of History from the University of Michigan. Email him samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
Despite the increasingly fierce competition in the streaming war, Bank of America analysts said on Tuesday that they believe Netflix is still the king of content and expect that by this time next year, the Los Gatos company’s share price will jump to $680 per share .
The streaming media war is undergoing a round of fierce integration. After a large-scale merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery, which operates HBO Max, Amazon spent the second half of May to acquire MGM. Both transactions still require regulatory approval.
In order to keep pace, Bank of America analysts said in a research report that they suspect that Netflix is paying attention to franchise rights and other intellectual property rights, which can be used in new movies and shows to support its choice. This is the opposite of the approach taken by rival Amazon when it spent $8.45 billion to annex MGM Studios to obtain library content from the iconic Hollywood studio.
Netflix has been deep in the field of e-commerce, aiming to gain advantages over other streaming media, but analysts are not impressed.
This spring, Netflix opened a new online store that sells clothing and action dolls and other equipment related to some of its content. According to The Information, the streaming giant is reportedly seeking to hire gaming executives. But analysts said that neither of these two measures will give them an advantage.
Netflix recently announced a multi-year partnership with Steven Spielberg’s production studio Amblin Partners, which will release several new movies every year. Analysts cheered the deal, saying it “helped” support Netflix’s movie channel. They also called the second season of “Lupin” (debuted in June), “Bridgetown” and “Witcher” (debuted later this year) as Netflix’s most important original content at the moment.
In the future, analysts are paying attention to the possible results of the British government’s plan to regulate American streaming media services. It is not yet clear what changes will be made, but analysts emphasized that the Minister of Culture of the United Kingdom is concerned that some viewers may regard the popular drama “The Crown” as a non-fiction. The government’s plan will be announced later this week.
Sam is mainly responsible for dot.LA’s entertainment and media business. Previously, he was a Marjorie Deane Fellow of The Economist, writing for the commercial and financial sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now a Disney streaming service). He holds an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson, an MPP from the University of California, Los Angeles, Ruskin, and a Bachelor of History from the University of Michigan. Email him samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
Sam is mainly responsible for dot.LA’s entertainment and media business. Previously, he was a Marjorie Deane Fellow of The Economist, writing for the commercial and financial sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now a Disney streaming service). He holds an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson, an MPP from the University of California, Los Angeles, Ruskin, and a Bachelor of History from the University of Michigan. Email him samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
Usually, pre-IPO investments are reserved for wealthy angel investors and institutional investors, who can cash out once the company goes public.
But Todd Goldberg and Darren Marble, the team behind the upcoming Shark Tank-like series “Coming to Market”, have a plan to level the competition.
Just as Robinhood increased the opportunities for retail investors to enter Wall Street, Marble and Goldberg referred to the listing as the “Robinhood of Angel Investment.”
As the founders work hard for a potential IPO on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, the series will give viewers the opportunity to invest in one of the five startups they follow.
Goldberg and Marble are the co-CEOs of Crush Capital, an investment company based in Beverly Hills. The show will be broadcast on Entrepreneur.com this fall.
What they are pitching to investors is that Crush democratizes IPO visits. Investors seem to be buying it: Crush Capital raised US$2.75 million in the second round of financing, led by AYA Capital Holdings, followed by Zilliqa Capital. The latest salary increase brings the total to $6 million.
“The one thing that connects the people who decide to invest, whether in the seed round or in this round, is that they get the investment immediately,” Goldberg said.
Post time: Jul-07-2021