Choppin’ It Up by Bloomberg Intelligence
Jan 20, 2026 · 37 min · 17 segments
The way diners are discovering restaurants has shifted away from reviews and to social media, Loop’s co-founder Anand Tumuluru tells Bloomberg Intelligence. In this episode of the Choppin’ It Up…
Mike HalenHost
So what did you see from the platform side that convinced you that restaurants are being underserved? So, Mike, I
think this might be a good opportunity to sort of present that central question that restaurants and marketplaces and investors alike, everybody asks the central question, is delivery a passing cloud? right is it a necessary evil is it just an acquisition channel that um you know you kind of acquire customers from one and then sort of send them to first party there's all kinds of questions that brands and investors everybody was struggling to sort of look at in the context of delivery and by the way the marketplaces themselves have very different approaches, right? Grubhub was menu transcription.
Uber was fundamentally coming off of a logistics sort of motivation where they were like, hey, we just have a bunch of supply.
DoorDash was coming from a completely different place where it's like, hey, you know, Tony's sort of like origin story was helping, you know, a Palo Alto restaurant out.
But the reason I think I got the conviction to actually go and jump, the thing that I actually saw from inside of the marketplace was that fundamentally, there was a cultural shift with respect to how consumers looked at delivery, right? So at one point, at some point, whenever delivery started, it was this couch potato, gluttonous thing that a lazy person would do that you don't talk about, you don't tell anybody that you did it.
You just order delivery on the, you know, without other people knowing about it.
And then I think culturally, I think it just became something that a sensible working couple, it just became a sensible, rational decision for a working couple, right? Where people started to just say, hey, I don't think, you know, initially it was for health reasons, but eventually it sort of became, it didn't go away.
It just became, hey, why am I making food at home when I should be spending money? my time going and perfecting my craft, going and doing things that I actually like.
And honestly, I don't think I will actually be able to make food that well, be that $20, $25.
So I think that cultural shift was what was really interesting and motivating for me.
On the same lines of what happened with drive-thru, right? Effectively, people eating in cars, it's bizarre for people to eat in cars.
Maybe you're, you know, actually, I'm from India where, you know, a lot of people like my parents would say, hey, don't eat in the car.
And it's, and it just became a culturally accepted thing here at some point.
And the reason for that was, you know, the Eisenhower state highway system and there was suburbia and, you know, we started to see an explosion in franchising.
There are all of these rails that exploded at the right time at the perfect spot.
So, There is this like technology shift that combines sort of at the right place at the right time with all of the infrastructure that's there.
That just felt like what was happening with delivery too, where we had the cloud migration.
We had like the great work that our digital points of sale were doing and order aggregators were doing.
So what did you see from the platform side that convinced you that restaurants are being underserved? So, Mike, I
think this might be a good opportunity to sort of present that central question that restaurants and marketplaces and investors alike, everybody asks the central question, is delivery a passing cloud? right is it a necessary evil is it just an acquisition channel that um you know you kind of acquire customers from one and then sort of send them to first party there's all kinds of questions that brands and investors everybody was struggling to sort of look at in the context of delivery and by the way the marketplaces themselves have very different approaches, right? Grubhub was menu transcription.
Uber was fundamentally coming off of a logistics sort of motivation where they were like, hey, we just have a bunch of supply.
DoorDash was coming from a completely different place where it's like, hey, you know, Tony's sort of like origin story was helping, you know, a Palo Alto restaurant out.
But the reason I think I got the conviction to actually go and jump, the thing that I actually saw from inside of the marketplace was that fundamentally, there was a cultural shift with respect to how consumers looked at delivery, right? So at one point, at some point, whenever delivery started, it was this couch potato, gluttonous thing that a lazy person would do that you don't talk about, you don't tell anybody that you did it.
You just order delivery on the, you know, without other people knowing about it.
And then I think culturally, I think it just became something that a sensible working couple, it just became a sensible, rational decision for a working couple, right? Where people started to just say, hey, I don't think, you know, initially it was for health reasons, but eventually it sort of became, it didn't go away.
It just became, hey, why am I making food at home when I should be spending money? my time going and perfecting my craft, going and doing things that I actually like.
And honestly, I don't think I will actually be able to make food that well, be that $20, $25.
So I think that cultural shift was what was really interesting and motivating for me.
On the same lines of what happened with drive-thru, right? Effectively, people eating in cars, it's bizarre for people to eat in cars.
Maybe you're, you know, actually, I'm from India where, you know, a lot of people like my parents would say, hey, don't eat in the car.
And it's, and it just became a culturally accepted thing here at some point.
And the reason for that was, you know, the Eisenhower state highway system and there was suburbia and, you know, we started to see an explosion in franchising.
There are all of these rails that exploded at the right time at the perfect spot.
So, There is this like technology shift that combines sort of at the right place at the right time with all of the infrastructure that's there.
That just felt like what was happening with delivery too, where we had the cloud migration.
We had like the great work that our digital points of sale were doing and order aggregators were doing.
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