The staff of Fortune recently assembled its predictions for 2016. Here’s one of our forecasts.
Everybody eats—but we may not eat nearly enough to support the ballooning food-delivery tech category. Consulting firm Rosenheim Advisors counted 88 companies in the U.S. that offer either meal kits, meal delivery, food e-commerce, online grocery shopping, or online ordering. “In the next 12 to18 months there will be some reckoning,” says Brita Rosenheim, who runs her eponymous firm.
She estimates that $733 million has flooded into in food tech delivery over the last six months from U.S. private investors, representing 57% of the total invested in food tech. That’s already more than the $697 million that was invested in all of 2014 (representing 28% of all food tech investments).
One sign of glut: The industry is starting to run out of names. Within the online-ordering category alone, there’s already EAT24, FoodtoEat, EatStreet, and EAT Club, to name just a few.
This article is part of the 2016 Fortune Crystal Ball, a package of 33 predictions about business, politics and the economy by the writers and editors of Fortune. To see the entire package, click here.
