The market digests corporate announcements one press release at a time. This is a structural flaw in analysis. Last week, DoorDash issued two such releases, and viewing them in isolation misses the far more interesting, and frankly dissonant, narrative they tell when read together.
The first announcement concerned a significant expansion into grocery with Kroger. The second detailed a new, expensive push into the dine-in restaurant experience. One is a strategy to own the household couch; the other is a strategy to own the restaurant table. These are not complementary initiatives. They are competing visions for the future of the company, funded from the same balance sheet. The data suggests DoorDash is in the midst of a profound identity crisis, and it's spending billions to figure itself out.
Let’s first examine the "Going Out" feature, the company’s new offensive into the world of in-person dining. This isn't a minor product update; it’s the culmination of a major acquisition. DoorDash integrated the restaurant tech platform SevenRooms (for a reported cost of over $1 billion) to power in-app reservations and offer dine-in rewards for its DashPass members. The stated goal is to support the “full dining journey,” moving beyond the simple `doordash delivery` transaction.
The mechanics are straightforward. Users of the `doordash app` can now book a table, get exclusive offers, and earn credits for visiting partner restaurants. The company claims guests receive an average of $9 in value per offer used. For restaurants, DoorDash promises a firehose of new customers from its user base and, more critically, access to an “enriched guest profile.” This profile aggregates data on a customer’s dining preferences and `doordash order` history, theoretically allowing for more personalized service. It’s a clear attempt to move up the value chain from a commoditized logistics provider to an indispensable technology partner. The move is also transparently defensive. It mirrors a similar play by `Uber Eats`, which partnered with OpenTable to roll out its own "Dine Out" tab.
Just as the market was processing the implications of this pivot toward dine-in, DoorDash announced a massive expansion of its grocery partnership with Kroger. Starting October 1st, the company will offer delivery from all of Kroger’s 2,700 U.S. stores. This is a significant logistical undertaking. Previously, the partnership was limited to niche items like sushi and flowers from a fraction of Kroger’s footprint—about 900 stores for sushi, to be more exact, 1,700 for flowers. Now, it encompasses the entire grocery aisle.
This deal makes Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the United States, fully available on the DoorDash platform. It’s a direct replacement for the Walmart partnership that dissolved in 2022 and a necessary move to compete with Instacart. It is a pure, unadulterated logistics play. It’s about volume, efficiency, and owning the last mile to the consumer’s front door. It is the tactical opposite of the high-touch, data-centric "Going Out" initiative.
Strategic Dissonance: The High Cost of a Divided Focus
The Strategic Dissonance
And this is the part of the analysis that I find genuinely puzzling. A company’s allocation of capital is the most honest indicator of its strategy. Here we have a billion-dollar expenditure to capture the diner who leaves their house, paired with a massive operational expansion to serve the shopper who does not. One business is about data, loyalty, and experience. The other is about speed, scale, and the cost-per-mile of a `dasher`.
The corporate narrative, of course, is that DoorDash is building a comprehensive platform for all food-related commerce. But a platform must have a coherent center of gravity. Is DoorDash a logistics network that happens to deliver food, or is it a restaurant technology company that happens to have a logistics network? The Kroger deal reinforces the former identity. The SevenRooms acquisition aims to build the latter. By aggressively pursuing both, the company risks succeeding at neither.
This brings us to a methodological critique of the data we’ve been given. DoorDash touts that its "Going Out" offers provide an "average of $9 in value" to the consumer. This is a classic vanity metric. It measures a perceived benefit to the user, but it reveals nothing about the economic return for the restaurant or for DoorDash itself. What is the customer acquisition cost for a restaurant using this feature? Does the "enriched guest profile" lead to a quantifiable increase in repeat business or average check size? Or is it simply a discount engine to drive foot traffic, a notoriously low-margin strategy? The details on the actual ROI for the `doordash merchant` remain scarce, but the impact on DoorDash’s P&L from the billion-dollar acquisition is crystal clear.
The company is now competing directly with entrenched, specialized players on two separate fronts. In the grocery delivery space, it faces Instacart, a company whose entire business model is optimized for the specific challenges of that vertical. In the dine-in and reservations space, it faces platforms like OpenTable and Resy, which have spent years building relationships and technology focused exclusively on filling tables. DoorDash is betting that its massive user base provides enough leverage to overcome the focused execution of its competitors. This is a bet on breadth over depth, a notoriously difficult strategy to execute profitably.
The core question for DoorDash is no longer simply about optimizing `doordash delivery` routes or managing its `doordash driver` network. It's about defining its fundamental purpose. Every dollar spent on developing AI-powered reservation systems for high-end restaurants is a dollar not spent on improving the unit economics of a gallon of milk being delivered from a Kroger. One path leads to a high-margin, software-as-a-service model. The other doubles down on a low-margin, high-volume logistics model. By walking both paths at once, DoorDash’s strategy ceases to be a clear line of advance and instead becomes an expensive and precarious straddle.
The Bifurcation of a Business Model
My final analysis is this: DoorDash is not evolving, it is bifurcating. It is actively building two different, and potentially conflicting, companies under a single brand. One is a logistics beast, built for scale and volume. The other is a hospitality tech service, built for data and relationships. The immense risk is not that one of these ventures will fail, but that the capital and focus required to pursue both simultaneously will dilute their effectiveness, leaving them vulnerable to more specialized competitors who know exactly which business they are in.
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