Yet another start-up has entered the food delivery space to try and profit from the surge in demand during the pandemic. Coco is a startup that uses delivery “robots” with remote human operators to shuttle food and other goods to customers, and pitches itself as being “COVID-safe” as well as getting rid of pesky tips for workers.
According to Coco’s site, its robots use cameras and GPS information to navigate. But it’s not as though a worker isn’t still facilitating your grocery delivery. Coco robots are also guided by a “remote human operator” who is “always on duty,” the site notes. Under the site’s “work with us” menu heading, there’s even a section labelled “drive our robots.”
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Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler ran into one of Coco’s bots and said he was “nearly run over” by one “very loud” robot (“like a very very loud RC car”) that he encountered at a corner sidewalk.
It’s unclear whether these robots are fully operated by a human or supervised—raising questions about how it’ll be able to react to humans in public spaces—but, regardless, a human being is indeed helping to deliver clients’ orders. Adding a robot means, as its site states, “No Tips.”
Coco is also a “platform” that offers the opportunity to “manage your own robot fulfillment center” which suggests that the operation is streamlined to minimize the number of human workers and increase potential earnings for partners—this would help explain how Coco claims to have a “$0 upfront cost” for fulfillment partners and a delivery fee of a flat $1.95.
Coco was initially founded as Cyan Robotics in April 2020 by UCLA alumni Zach Rash and Brad Squicciarini, who were interested in offering delivery services to people living within a five-mile radius of UCLA. During this earlier iteration, much of the same business model was already in place: warehouses where robots are packed for delivery, remote supervisors, no order minimum, and a low delivery fee.
In an interview with the Daily Bruin, Rash told the school newspaper his rationale for the delivery fee was that “large order minimums are not super accessible if you’re running on a college budget, and so we want to make on-demand delivery of groceries more accessible.”
While Coco pitches itself as being “COVID-safe” and a timely company for a pandemic, it’s also clear that the company is seeking to cut away many of the costs associated with gig delivery platforms (including tips for workers) and offer a cheaper alternative.
Nowhere does Coco mention how much robot operators make, and Coco did not answer Motherboard’s request for comment.
Coco isn’t the only “robot” food-delivery service, let alone food delivery service, that’s tried to take advantage of a pandemic that has shuttered countless others. Consolidation and price wars have accelerated between food delivery giants like Uber and DoorDash, while smaller enterprises have tried to fill in the gaps by offering to cut restaurant delivery fees.
The problem, however, is that the lion’s share of these benefits have gone to companies while gig workers continue to struggle to survive working for these companies despite the demand boom.
