Amazon Pilots ‘Daily Dish’ To Bring Workers Their Lunch

Anyone who has ever tried to slip in and out of work to get a quick bite has known the pain. It seems like you should have enough time, but somehow, by the time you get to the food and back, lunch break is over, and you’re eating a chicken parm sub at your desk.

But Amazon thinks it can fix that.

The internet’s main source of delivering everything, Amazon, is now piloting something called “Daily Dish,” which will, as the name implies, bring employees their lunch, one a day.

If it successfully gets out of the pilot phase, that is. Currently, a batch of Seattle-based firms are taking Daily Dish for a test drive to see if it will work for workers everywhere. The system works by sending workers at affiliated firms an a.m. text and giving them till 11 a.m. to place a lunch order via the Prime Now app. They then wait for lunch to arrive between noon and 12:30 p.m.

“Daily Dish offers Prime members a convenient and affordable lunch option featuring freshly prepared lunches delivered from local restaurants every weekday. The service offers four choices every day — one meat and one vegetarian option from two different restaurants — giving customers choice in cuisine and meal type,” Amazon told GeekWire.

The entrance into worker lunch puts Amazon in direct competition with Peach (Amazon and Peach are serving lunch from many of the same places and offer remarkably similar interfaces and ordering parameters.) Peach does have the vanishingly small advantage of being in three cities (Boston, Seattle and San Diego), but Amazon has a long and proud tradition of spreading out services throughout the nation, and quickly, when it is of a mind to.

But then again, anyone can order from Peach. To use Amazon for lunch, you must already be a Prime member, even if you are at a participating workplace. Of course, recent data indicates that there are so many Prime members that this is likely not going to be much of a limitation for anyone who actually wants to use the service.