FCaaS (Fried Chicken as a Service)

Maybe you've heard of Software as a Service. SaaS. Maybe you've heard of Platform as a Service. PaaS. You can get just about anything as a Service these days. XaaS they call it. X stands for anything I guess.

Today's comic was about Photosynthesis as a Service. If trees could somehow turn the process of converting solar energy into chemical energy into an on-demand thing you purchased via the web, they probably wood. Sorry, I like tree puns even though they're not poplar.

Well I was reading this article about Everything as a Service. Go read it now and then come back. Really, I'll wait. Okay, now we can continue. So I read that article and I was thinking about what Colonel Sanders would do. No, that's not weird. I often think about what Colonel Sanders would do in different situations.

Here's the thing - one of the points of the "Everything as a Service" article was how the food service industry in particular is starting to embrace the outsourcing of parts of the business. Now for the Colonel Sanders part. You may or may not know that the Colonel is credited with inventing the franchise model for the fast food business. That was big at the time, but if he was starting his business today he might go with the Whatever as a Service model as his big idea.

"Fried Chicken" by Mike DelGaudio from USA - Fried Chicken.
Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Let's say you had a great recipe for fried chicken. The best fried chicken anyone ever tasted. You go around to some cities and train a bunch of people to cook your fried chicken in their homes. You put a website together where people can order your home-cooked fried chicken and have it delivered to them in these select locations. Someone in one of those cities goes to the website and orders some fried chicken. Seconds later, one of your trained chicken fryers in that area gets a notification on their phone that they need to fry up some food. At the same time, your system automatically sets up delivery from the home of the chicken fryer to the home of the chicken eater using one of these Car as a Service (CaaS) providers like Uber or Lyft. In 30 minutes when the chicken is done, it gets picked up and delivered. The consumer paid online when they ordered. You give the cook and the car their shares of the funds and keep the rest. The only way this could possibly get better is if you delivered the fried chicken with an aerial drone or something.

Voila! Fried Chicken as a Service. Using other things that are services.

Amphibian.com comic for September 3, 2014