An employee, left, serves a coffee beverage to a customer at a Luckin Coffee outlet in Beijing, China, on Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2019. Luckin, the Chinese startup that's banking on selling cappuccinos to on-the-go office workers, is spending millions of dollars a year opening outlets to unseat Starbucks Corp. as the top java seller in the country. Photographer: Gilles Sabrie/Bloomberg
Silicon Valley has built innumerable ways to get prepared food delivered to your door. DoorDash, Grubhub, UberEats, Caviar, Amazon Restaurants, Postmates and others have scores of paid couriers who whisk hot meals from restaurants to customers for a fee.
One startup has a different twist: It harnesses its own users to do the deliveries in exchange for an occasional free lunch. Ritual, a five-year-old company headquartered in San Francisco and Toronto, has landed an impressive US$113mil (RM461.83mil) in venture backing for what sounds like a super-simple idea: an order-ahead app for meals that also helps co-workers piggyback on one another's lunch or snack orders.
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