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We all know he feeling of craving our favorite mal, and not wanting to get off the couch. Maybe its raining outside? A blizzard? A full blown pandemic that kept everyone in their homes? Whatever the reason, the market of ordering by app, and 'food delivery' in general, has had a storied past!
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Today, we are shipping out the history of food delivery
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Takeout food dates back thousands of years. Unfortunately, it wasn't until much later
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when Italy's King Umberto I and his first cousin slash wife, Queen Margherita
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took a trip down to Naples in the summer of 1889 that dinner grew its first pair of legs
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During her stay at the Palace of Capodimonte, Queen Margherita grew tired
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of all of the palace's fancy French cuisine and she wanted to instead get down and dirty
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with what the peasants were eating. So she requested that someone fetch her some pizza, and they ordered famous pizza maker
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Rafael Esposito to come deliver three of his best pies. This legend marks the first ever mention of pizza being delivered straight to someone's door
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Shortly thereafter, in 1890, the first known meal delivery service began operating in India's
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rapidly growing Bombay, the city otherwise known today as Mumbai. According to legend, one banker decided that, in order to save some time and to make sure
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he could eat food he actually wanted, he would pay for someone to swing by his house every day
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to pick up a home-cooked meal and bring it to him at work. Others soon took notice, and it wasn't
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long before just about everyone wanted their own personal lunch courier. Enter Mahadio Havaji
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Bache, along with his hundred-man legion of lunch-slinging cyclists and handcart pushers
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Mahadio became the first businessman to formalize this growing lunchtime delivery system
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thereby becoming the first known business to offer any kind of food delivery. Then in 1922 along came Los Angeles Kinshu Cafe That year the Kinshu Cafe put out an ad that claimed it was the only place on the West Coast making and delivering real Chinese dishes
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While this marked the first known time that a restaurant was offering delivery within the U.S.
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the onset of the Great Depression squelched any further hopes for increased delivery options
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That is, until the close of the Second World War, when Americans were suddenly a whole lot richer
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and many veterans, fresh from Europe and Asia, craved foreign cuisine. In the 1950s, Casa de More started to offer free delivery on all orders greater than $2.50
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With the concurrent rise of television, the Never Leave Home option became a quick hit
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and it didn't take long for other restaurants to start offering pizza delivery to
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All the while, an entirely different mode of takeout dining was on the rise
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In 1947, the first ever drive-thru restaurant, an upgrade to the already popular drive-in restaurant, opened up
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It was called Red's Giant Hamburg, and it became a Route 66 staple in Springfield, Missouri for five whole decades
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In 1994, Pizza Hut launched one of the world's first ever forays into online commerce
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They called it PizzaNet. Customers in the Santa Cruz area could open up the PizzaNet website, place their orders using their shaky AOL dial-up connections
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and have piping hot pizza delivered right to their front door. Soon, food delivery services started popping up just about everywhere
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and by the 2000s, most major pizza brands had followed in Pizzanet's footsteps
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Today, about 80% of all Americans get food delivered at least once per month
Hospitality Industry
Food Service
Restaurants
Fast Food
Grocery Delivery Services
Restaurant Delivery Services
Food & Grocery Delivery