Gary Joerres, a retired restaurant owner, missed the Derby Lane Poker Room during the shutdown caused by the coronavirus. The St. Petersburg …

A startup called Portobel is working to help food producers shift their businesses so they can support direct-to-consumer deliveries. Portobel is backed by Heroic Ventures and led by Ranjith Kumaran, founder or co-founder of file-sharing company Hightail (acquired by OpenText) and loyalty startup PunchTab (acquired by Walmart Labs). Kumaran told me that he and his co-founders …

According to CNBC there are two suitors rivaling Uber for purchase of U.S. food delivery company Grubhub: Just Eat Takeaway (the union of Just Eat and Takeaway) and Delivery Hero. Both are European companies perhaps looking for a major entry to the United States market. Just Eat Takeaway is based in the U.K. and Holland, …

Some employers, backed by lawmakers, are seeking protections from lawsuits if workers contract the coronavirus. In May, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy said liability protections would be a priority in the next relief bill. In Iowa, Republican lawmakers are rallying in support of a bill offering coronavirus lawsuit protection to restaurants, hospitals, and meatpacking plants. …

Mercato Partners, a 13-year-old, Salt Lake City, Utah-based investment firm that oversees a growth fund, a secondary investment fund and a venture fund, has launched yet another fund — this one a $90 million vehicle that the firm says will be used to invest in restaurant concepts that are gaining traction. Its timing is interesting, …

It was perhaps not until the COVID-19 pandemic hit the planet that most of us had ever heard or uttered the phrase “supply chain”. But in a global economy that had become drunk and lazy on ‘just in time ordering’ and similar, the threat to supply chains of things like, oh, food, from that pesky …

Facebook and PayPal have made investments in GoJek, joining Google and Tencent among other high-profile technology firms that have backed the five-year-old Southeast Asian ride-hailing firm that also offers food delivery and mobile payments. Facebook, for which it is the first investment in an Indonesia-based firm, and PayPal did not disclose the size of their …

Flipkart’s Farmermart, the e-commerce outlet’s ambitious plan to operate a full-fledged food retail business, including its own private label, a grocery supply chain and even open stores, has run into trouble. The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has rejected the e-tailer’s proposal to sell food products through online and mobile platforms. …

The Indian government has rejected Flipkart’s proposal to enter the food retail business in a setback for Walmart, which owns majority of the Indian e-commerce firm and which recently counted its business in Asia’s third-largest economy as one of the worst impacted by the global coronavirus pandemic. The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal …

Box CEO Aaron Levie has been working to change the software world for 15 years, but the pandemic has accelerated the move to cloud services much faster than anyone imagined. As he pointed out yesterday in an Extra Crunch Live interview, who would have thought three months ago that businesses like yoga and cooking classes …