If this morning's Top of the Fold was about how many layers now sit between your kitchen and your guest, The Deal Room is about a partnership trying to take them away.
On November 9th, Slim Chickens launched ordering straight from the Samsung Smart TV home screen, through a partnership with klyq (owned and operated by NBTV) and Gett.
Here are a few numbers:
Slim Chickens: 300+ locations across 34 U.S. states, plus international units in the UK, Germany, Turkey and Malaysia, with a stated goal of 600+ restaurants over the next decade.
klyq: a shoppable streaming marketplace built on NBTV's patented BuyBar platform, available on 80mm+ U.S. Samsung Smart TVs and expanding to Vizio, Apple TV and Google TV.
Gett: runs First Party Everywhere (FPE), a direct-to-merchant ordering network with 40,000+ partner restaurants. Gett launched FPE just days earlier, on November 5th.
Full disclosure, and a proud one: NBTV (klyq's parent company) and klyq are both Branded partners, so please weigh my enthusiasm accordingly.
Here's how it works. A Slim Chickens ad appears on the Samsung TV home screen. The viewer clicks it (or klyq’s it 😊), watches some short brand content, builds an order in the BuyBar, and checks out with the remote. No app download, no QR code, no phone.
Here's the part that matters for The Deal Room reader: the order runs through Gett's FPE network straight into Slim Chickens' own first-party ordering platform, the same one behind its app and website. There's no marketplace in the middle. The guest pays Slim Chickens' own menu prices, with no marketplace markup. Nothing changes in the kitchen and there's no new equipment, so the order just shows up like any other app order.
NBTV co-founder and CEO Nick Buzzell put the problem well: "Restaurants have been advertising on TV for 70 years and asking people to remember them later."
That's the whole gap. TV has always created the craving. Then the guest had to pick up a phone, open an app (usually somebody else's), and search for you, hoping nobody else's promo got to them first. Slim Chickens' VP of brand performance, Ben Turner, called the TV "where people get hungry," and he summed up the bet in one line: "We're turning TVs into Slim Chickens counters."
Put this week's two stories side by side and you can see the whole delivery map:
Third party is consolidating. DoorDash is buying Instacart for $17 billion. Amazon swapped Grubhub for Uber Eats. The marketplaces are getting bigger, and now they sit inside other people's apps.
Second party arrived. A few weeks ago, Olo launched its consumer app, giving guests marketplace-style reach while restaurants keep direct-channel economics. (Full disclosure, again: Olo is a Branded partner.)
First party is going on the road. Here's what's new. First party has always had the best economics and the worst distribution. You keep the margin and the data, but you have to talk a guest into downloading your app and then convince them to open it again. Most restaurants lose that fight.
Gett's pitch flips it. Don't make the guest come to your app. Take your app's checkout to wherever the guest already is: the TV, a video game, a social feed, a hotel, and (here's the big one) AI assistants. As Gett's CEO, Paul Stoltz, put it, "TV is about to become one of many new consumer front doors for how people discover brands and order from their favorites."
Front doors. Sound familiar? This morning, Amazon and Uber were fighting over who owns the front door. Gett's bet is that there won't be one front door. There'll be dozens, and the restaurant should own the checkout behind every one of them.
One more thing I liked: per his Food On Demand bio, Stoltz was a leader at JoyRun when Walmart bought it in 2021, and he then helped build Walmart's in-house restaurant ordering. Yes, the same Walmart restaurant channel from this morning's Top of the Fold. He's seen this movie from the retailer's side.
Let's land this on the P&L, b/c that's where it matters.
C-Store News puts marketplace commissions at 20% to 30%. On a $40 order at a 25% commission, that's $10 going out the door. A first-party order keeps most of that $10 (minus whatever your ordering stack, payments and delivery cost you).
A first-party order tells you who ordered, what they ordered and when. That's what lets you send a bounce-back offer, grow loyalty and recognize a regular. A marketplace order mostly tells the marketplace.
On your own channel, you set the menu price. Nobody else is adding a markup between your menu and your guest.
On a marketplace, you're a tile in a grid. On your own channel, you're the whole screen.
Now, I promised you I'd always give it to you straight, so here's the other side. This is a pilot in one market, with no volume or conversion data yet. Nobody has disclosed what Gett or klyq charge, so the margin math above is the ceiling, not the net. And the release doesn't say who carries the bag. If the courier is a white-label delivery service under the hood, that's still a cost on the P&L, even if the guest relationship stays with you.
And here's the lesson from "Party of the Second Part" that still holds: you can't guilt a guest into ordering direct. Lower cost to the restaurant won't change consumer behavior. Convenience will. That's why this is interesting. It doesn't ask the guest to do anything harder. It asks them to do something easier: order from the couch, in the moment, with the remote they're already holding. As Buzzell said, Slim Chickens understood "that the craving and the checkout should happen in the same moment."
The takeaway: Third party rents you the guest. First party lets you keep them.
Take the marketplace volume when it makes sense. But every time a new front door opens (the TV, the AI assistant, whatever comes next), make sure your checkout is the one behind it.
