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2 UCLA Students Thought Food Delivery Was Broken. Shake Shack Called Their Invention Its ‘Favorite Courier.’

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Why This Matters

This article highlights how Coco Robotics, founded by UCLA students, is revolutionizing food delivery with purpose-built autonomous vehicles, addressing the inefficiencies and high costs associated with traditional car-based deliveries. Their innovative approach has the potential to significantly reduce delivery costs, improve food quality, and reshape last-mile logistics in the food industry.

Key Takeaways

They looked at a 5,000-pound car delivering a 5-pound bag of food and decided there had to be a better way.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Key Takeaways Coco Robotics is doing 1,000 deliveries a day in Los Angeles and has completed more than 500,000 deliveries across more than 1 million miles.

The company’s VP of Enterprise Partnerships believes using traditional cars to deliver small food orders creates unnecessary costs.

Shake Shack regional manager gave Coco a particularly memorable review.

Restaurant delivery has a vehicle problem.

Coco Robotics was founded in 2020 by two UCLA engineers who began questioning whether traditional cars made sense for moving restaurant orders short distances.

“They were just kind of looking around at the environment thinking, ‘Why are we using 5,000-pound cars to deliver a five-pound bag of food?’” Melissa Fahs, Vice President of Enterprise Partnerships at Coco Robotics, says. “There has to be a better way.”

The founders set out to build a vehicle specifically for restaurant delivery. Fahs joined the Coco team after spending years working with restaurant partners and seeing firsthand how difficult the economics of third-party delivery could be.

“The last mile is broken,” Fahs says. “The cost equation has to change.”

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