Lauren Goode

Recent Posts by Lauren Goode

With Track Your Grub, GrubHubbers Can See Exactly Where Their Food Delivery Is

Ordering food through Web sites or mobile apps like GrubHub or Seamless is sinfully easy. (Sometimes, I still marvel that food arrives at my door and I didn’t even have to speak to someone.)

But it can also feel like you’re ordering from a black hole, with little insight into what’s going on behind the scenes — or when your delivery will arrive.

GrubHub has come up with a feature that lets users track their food’s progress as it is being delivered to their doors.

The feature, called Track Your Grub, joins GrubHub’s OrderHub and DeliveryHub as part of a three-step system.

Restaurants listed on GrubHub use a company-provided Android tablet to take orders via the Internet. Drivers then use the DeliveryHub app on GPS-enabled mobile devices to communicate with both the restaurant and the orderer.

Provided that the driver is using the DeliveryHub, customers should be able to see the driver moving toward them in real time, similar to the way cars are tracked in the Uber car-service app.

Along the way, GrubHubbers also receive push notifications or SMS messages updating them on the status of their delivery.

The feature is being rolled out today across iPhone and Android mobile apps. GrubHub says that some 100 restaurants in six cities (including New York, San Francisco and Boston) will have the Track Your Grub option to start.

GrubHub has also said that more than 25 percent of its total orders now come from mobile devices.

GrubHub was planning on demoing its new food-tracking feature at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference last month. Attendees were going to be able to track ordered food as it made its way onstage to Matt Maloney, GrubHub’s co-founder and CEO. Unfortunately, the conference was postponed due to Hurricane Sandy, so GrubHubbers will have to check out the food-tracking feature for themselves.

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