Grubhub Adopts Amazon Tech to Enable Residential Building Delivery

Grubhub has completed nearly 1 million deliveries using Amazon Key, a technology that enables delivery drivers to enter common areas of residential buildings and gated communities, when property managers have opted in to the delivery service.

Amazon Key allows third-party delivery services like Grubhub to make deliveries without coordinating with building staff or waiting for manual access, frees residents from having to coordinate package hand-offs or miss deliveries, and gives property managers control over enabling access to these areas, the companies said in a Monday (Oct. 21) press release emailed to PYMNTS.

“The reduced need for coordination means less friction at every stage, allowing us to deliver easily and securely while giving customers and property managers peace of mind,” Megan Mergener, senior director of logistics at Grubhub, said in the release.

For third-party delivery services to use Amazon Key at a location, authorized property managers have to opt in to that delivery service, according to the release.

Once they have opted in, property managers can control the delivery service’s access to their location, can revoke that access at any time and can review the delivery partner’s access history for their building in an Amazon Key dashboard, the release said.

Only the delivery partner who is assigned a delivery to that location will gain time-bound access to the common area of the building, per the release.

In the time Grubhub has been using Amazon Key, the company has seen a 50% reduction in partner care team calls and a 22% decrease in order cancellations, according to the release.

“For years, Amazon Key has transformed how Amazon deliveries are made within restricted-access buildings, providing a seamless experience for building staff and delivery drivers alike,” Kaushik Mani, director Amazon Key, said in the release. “We’re excited to now extend that same convenience to Grubhub.”

PYMNTS Intelligence found in March 2023 that 5% of consumers made their most recent food purchase through a third-party restaurant delivery aggregator and that 40% of consumers had used an aggregator at least once in the previous six months.

Generation Z consumers and those earning more than $100,000 a year are especially likely to use food aggregators, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Connected Dining: Third-Party Restaurant Aggregators Keep the Young and Affluent Engaged.”