DoorDash, the U.S. food delivery company, wanted to take over Britain’s Deliveroo, but the companies weren’t able to reach an agreement, Bloomberg reported Sunday (March 6).
The merger, initially considered last summer, would have made a food delivery company with £4 billion ($5.2 billion) in sales.
DoorDash ended up buying Wolt Enterprises Oy, a Finnish startup, for around $8 billion, one of the more notable mergers in the field.
Food delivery was surging in value during the pandemic, particularly its early stage when a vaccine wasn’t available. But most of the companies have struggled to make a profit.
Read more: DoorDash Aims to Capture in-Store Restaurant Sales With Bbot Acquisition
DoorDash also recently acquired Bbot, a restaurant ordering and payment tech provider, which PYMNTS wrote will improve online channels and power in-store ordering and payments.
“We’re excited to bring our combined suite to an even wider selection of merchants across the hospitality space — including bars, hotels and ghost kitchens — so these businesses can engage with more customers, increase their quality of service, and grow sales,” DoorDash Chief Revenue Officer Tom Pickett said in a statement. “Bbot has built best-in-class features and highly customizable tools that will enable DoorDash to better support the ever-growing range of merchant needs.”
PYMNTS research had found that 42% of all consumers had used a delivery aggregator in the last 18 months. Of that, 54% had used DoorDash.
But the report notes that the percentage of people who use DoorDash is still behind the total, larger populace of restaurant-goers.
Findings from a survey found that, in a survey of 2,400 U.S. adults, over two-thirds of them order from at least one type of restaurant at least once a month.
Because of this, DoorDash’s Bbot acquisition makes sense, as it could help grow the number of total transactions able to be done.
