Dive Brief:
- Grubhub is testing a new tool built to incentivize dine-in occasions with partner restaurants in Chicago and New York City, according to an emailed statement.
- Consumers who link their card to the tool, called The Drop, will be able to choose from three personalized, weekly awards to use at partner restaurants each Thursday, Grubhub CEO Howard Migdal said in an email. When consumers use those rewards by the following Wednesday, they can earn Grubhub credits to use on pickup or delivery orders within 30 days.
- The Drop makes use of technology from Claim, a rewards platform that Grubhub’s parent company Wonder acquired earlier this year, to improve consumers’ ability to discover and enjoy new restaurants, Migdal wrote.
Dive Insight:
Migdal said that The Drop would create “more ways for diners to engage with restaurants while helping our merchant partners reach customers across more dining occasions.”
Grubhub made The Drop available to a subset of its app users in New York and Chicago on Tuesday, and the first rewards will go live on Thursday, the company said.
The first round of participating restaurants include Tacombi, Juice Generation, Chopt Creative Salad Co., DIG, Dos Toros, Momoya, 7th Street Burger and Pokeworks, Grubhub said.
The delivery company will expand The Drop’s availability to all Grubhub users in those markets later in October, Migdal said, before a broader national rollout.
Participating restaurants can “reach highly engaged diners, drive incremental visits and encourage repeat business,” Migdal said.
The program will also supply data to partner merchants about which offers and rewards perform well and drive consumer engagement.
This is not the first time a major delivery aggregator has made a move into on-premise rewards. Last fall, DoorDash added a “Going Out” tab to its app that let users make dine-in reservations and redeem rewards in-store following its acquisition of SevenRooms. Last year, Uber Eats announced and then rolled out a similar platform in partnership with OpenTable.
