These days, there’s a buffet of meal delivery services and apps that make ordering your favorite eats and having them brought straight to your door as simple as a few swipes and clicks. From old standbys to newcomers, we picked the best services that’ll have your family saying, “Let’s order in tonight!” Read on to feast on a smörgåsbord of food delivery apps!
Amazon Restaurants
Ever since Amazon launched its Prime service in 2005, online shoppers have come to expect super-fast delivery of everything from electronics to diapers. With the purchase of Whole Foods last year, Amazon signaled that it’s getting serious about food, too. Using the Amazon Prime Now app, hungry Amazon Prime members can order meal delivery via Amazon Restaurants, with orders arriving in an hour or less. Available in more than a dozen cities and with an always growing number of restaurant partners, Prime members also can use Alexa’s voice-shopping function on their Amazon Echo or Echo Dot to re-order previously ordered meals by saying a restaurant name or cuisine type. Best of all, delivery is free to Prime members.
Caviar is an easy way to order meals from popular, high-end local restaurants across the U.S. With options to order home delivery or at-restaurant pickup, Caviar serves up some of the best food in your city—from Asian takeout to Sicilian pizza. Restaurant partners include Momofuku, Blue Smoke, Eataly and The Meatball Shop, among others. Caviar’s free food ordering app is currently available in nearly two dozen cities and markets, including Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.
More than just a food-delivery app, Delivery.com aspires to be the one-stop shop for busy parents to order home delivery of local food, groceries and other household needs. In addition to browsing thousands of menus and ordering food from local restaurants, the app lets users order liquor, groceries and even schedule pickup and drop-off of laundry and dry cleaning—all delivered to your door. There are plenty of exclusive app-only discounts, and new users get a 15% off coupon for their first order over $15 as well as $7 for referring a friend. With more than one million active users and 10,000-plus local business partners, Delivery.com currently is available in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Washington D.C., Philadelphia and hundreds of other U.S. cities.
If you’re stuck at home and your family has a hankering for a meal from a restaurant that usually doesn’t provide delivery service, DoorDash comes to the rescue by providing access to home delivery that other food-ordering apps typically don’t offer. Currently serving more than 600 cities in North America—including smaller cities and towns that often aren’t served by bigger food-ordering app services—DoorDash utilizes a courier model (think Uber for food delivery), which means you can order food from eateries that range from McDonald’s to P.F. Chang’s, and get it delivered to your home. Handy features on the app include advance ordering, real-time delivery tracker, and no order minimums.
Originally created by Yelp and recently acquired by GrubHub, Eat24 claims free pickup and delivery from 40,000 restaurants in more than 1,500 cities, including Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C. New features include location search, a fun Tweet My Meal function, and payment options that include PayPal and Apple Pay.
Chicago-based Eat Purely defies the usual expectation of greasy-spoon takeout fare by offering healthy, seasonal, chef-crafted meals that are delivered to your door on demand. With a menu that changes daily, Eat Purely’s options are fresh and healthy meals that arrive in about 30 minutes or less. As added bonuses, deliveries can be scheduled up to a week in advance, and there are plenty of choices for eaters with food restrictions or are on special diets such as gluten-free or paleo.
Still the Mack Daddy of food-ordering apps, GrubHub features ordering options from more than 55,000 restaurant partners in over 1,200 cities across the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. Like its sister food-ordering app Seamless, GrubHub’s nicely designed app lets hungry diners quickly search nearby restaurants, scroll through ratings and reviews, and order (and re-order) their favorite dishes in just a few clicks. Bonus: Payments can be made via Android Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal or good-old-fashioned cash or credit cards, so you won’t miss a beat to get your grub on.
When the kids are at grandma and grandpa’s house or they’ve already gone to bed, sometimes the best home-delivered meal is a liquid one. Minibar makes ordering wine, beer and liquor delivered to your door in as little as 30 to 60 minutes as easy as the touch of a button. Simply enter your delivery address, add your favorite items to your cart and checkout with your credit card. Minibar currently serves select markets, including Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Chicago, California, Colorado, Texas, Florida, Phoenix, Minnesota, Washington D.C., Nashville, and more. New locations coming soon! $5 off first order.
For parents who are worried about less-than-healthy fast-food takeout, Order Healthy connects users with local restaurants and groups food options based on what’s healthy and what’s not. The app provides access to more than 10,000 restaurants in more than a dozen markets and uses a color-coded system to indicate which menu items are not only delicious but also good for you and your family.
Whether you’re craving an iced latte from Starbucks, a burrito bowl from Chipotle or even bag of chips from the neighborhood CVS, Postmates gives you easy, on-demand access to local restaurants and stores with just a few clicks. With a fleet of delivery people, the app instantly assigns the best possible Postmate to ensure the fastest possible delivery, either at a one-time flat-rate fee or through an unlimited subscription. Real-time tracking lets you keep tabs on your delivery progress via a live map, and deliveries can be made virtually anywhere—at home, at work or at the playground. Postmates is available in 50 U.S. cities, including most major metro areas, as well as Mexico City
Launched in 1999, Seamless started as a web-based system for companies to order food from restaurants and caterers for corporate events. A few years later, Seamless transitioned from exclusively serving business eaters to opening its service to individual users. Today, Seamless is available in a dozen cities, including Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington D.C., and boasts more than 25,000 restaurant partners in the U.S. and the U.K. (thanks to its merger with GrubHub in 2013). With its easy search function (did someone say Taco Tuesdays?), one-click re-order option, and no additional fees, Seamless is the go-to app for food delivery or takeout for many urban foodies.
With so many food delivery apps adopting a courier-service model, it’s no wonder that ride-sharing app Uber would want to get in on the food business. Uber Eats lets users browse local restaurants and fast food favorites, place orders from the app, then track delivery time. Using their Uber accounts, eaters simply tap to seamlessly pay with their existing Uber accounts, or add a credit card. Uber Eats is currently available in dozens of cities and metro areas worldwide, with more added frequently.
