Reminding you of your friends' birthdays, showing you which of your relatives is racist, meddling in global geopolitics... truly there is nothing Facebook can't do. The next step in their quest to monopolize your attention: Food delivery. 

They officially announced the service today after testing it over the past year. Facebook seems to think that the process of ordering food has become too complicated, and since you're already looking for restaurant reviews on their site (are you?) that they should streamline the process.

According to the press release, they'll be working with "a number of food ordering services like EatStreet, Delivery.com, DoorDash, ChowNow and Olo, as well as restaurants like Jack in the Box, Five Guys, Papa John's, and Panera, so you don't have to search through multiple places to find what you're looking for." Except for all of those delivery networks, anyway.

You'll be able to place your order through a dedicated "Order Food" section in the Explore sidebar. It lets you browse available restaurant options and choose which of the available delivery services you'd like to have bring it to you; you can filter by location, delivery versus pickup, price range, cuisine, and whether or not the restaurant is open. If you don't have an account with the chosen delivery service, you can sign up for it in the app, because at this point, what's one more stored credit card account linked to the rest of your internet presence.

Nothing really seems to set the service apart from every other food delivery site other than the fact that it's linked to your Facebook profile, though the provider aggregation could prove convenient. As a Brooklynite, I don't foresee this tearing me away from my time-honored Yelp review and Seamless traditions, but it may be more useful in cities that don't aren't already overcrowded with delivery options. It's not like Facebook's algorithm hasn't already figured out that you were secretly ordering three orders of pad thai just for yourself, anyway.

Share This Post