By Rob DelaCruz, vice president and general manager of Grubhub Campus

While the Spring semester may be well underway, we’re taking a look back at the last 12 months of order trends, innovation and then some. 

2023 was the best year yet for Grubhub Campus Dining, the higher-ed-focused part of Grubhub’s business that serves college students and directly integrates mobile ordering into campus meal plans. This integration allows universities to reimagine students’ dining experience with innovative solutions. We saw the most orders in our 10+ year history of working with campus partners, with total Marketplace orders growing by 30%. We also grew our roster of university partners by nearly 20%, adding the University of Chicago, Villanova University, the University of Mississippi, Northeastern University, Mississippi State and others. 

We know options are important and that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to dining, which is why we offer solutions for on and off-campus ordering, or a mix, depending on what our partners are looking for. The majority of our campus orders are for pickup since students tend to grab meals between classes, but over the years, we’ve seen delivery orders rise in popularity. In 2023, campus delivery orders increased by 35%.

Speaking of delivery, we offer robot delivery to our campus partners through partnerships with Starship, Cartken and Kiwibot. At checkout, customers can select robot delivery, and experience a fun and convenient new way to order food delivery. Robot delivery is available on select campuses across the country, including The Ohio State University, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Arizona. This type of delivery has been well received as adoption continues, and robot delivery orders were up 500% in the last year.

Burrito bowls, cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets and mac and cheese were some of the staples students were ordering. And speaking of staples, another hallmark of the college experience is the local independent restaurants in town. Independent restaurants truly make up the flavors and the fabric of local communities, and with our flexible dining options, we want to make sure students have ample dining options no matter where they are ordering from. To do this, we’ve grown our independent restaurant footprint serving these college communities by more than 24%.

In addition to adding more dining options, we are also evolving our offering to include tech-forward innovations. I talked about robot delivery already, but at the start of the 2023 school year, we expanded our campus offerings with Amazon’s Just Walk Out Technology. 

This technology allows for a frictionless shopping experience by enabling students, faculty and staff to skip the checkout line thanks to the payment automatically being deducted from their meal plan, declining account balance or other stored payment methods linked to their Grubhub account when they leave the store. We also have a partnership with Apex smart lockers that allows restaurant team members to punch a code into one of the Apex lockers, insert the bag and send the customer a text alert with the designated locker and code for pickup. The lockers help campuses and businesses increase operational efficiencies and provide fast order pickup for students and guests, so it’s a win-win. 

For more information on our Campus Dining services, please visit here.