food Archive

When I lived in Manhattan, I ordered food delivery many times each week. Some places I called directly and some I used SeamlessWeb. Tonight I came across another food delivery service named GrubHub. The idea is simple: if you live in a city GrubHub covers (Boston, Chicago, New York and SF), you select a restaurant, select your food, enter your delivery details and payment info and the order is dispatched to the restaurant.

What’s interesting about GrubHub is that they list restaurants that both pay them and that don’t pay them. Most of the services I’ve seen to-date only display the establishments they have deals with. I like their about us page as well – it’s open and honest. Order from a restaurant with a seal on the page and GrubHub makes a cut on the sale; otherwise nothing.

The interface is well designed and I found searching to work fine. They are currently looking for a community manager via the jobs page.

What I don’t get is why they would expand into Seamless Web territory so early on. Why not own a city that SeamlessWeb isn’t in? There are plenty of other food delivery websites today and I think the key is to expand as you would in the game of Risk. Take the small countries (or cities in this case) and then go after the big locations.  There are so many other cities where GrubHub would work across the U.S.

Five… Five Dollar… Five Dollar Footlong – that horrible commercial jingle has now hit the online and mobile scene. NY-based GoMobo has partnered with Subway to provide online ordering. The program is called Subway Now and basically allows you to skip the line. Rather than standing in line waiting for your footlong, you order online with GoMobo and the sandwich will be waiting for you when you arrive. Payment is also handled on the GoMobo side so you don’t even have to wait in line to pay. What I like about the idea is that I might get the sandwich I actually want, the way I want it.

Subway Now launches on Monday in New York City and my guess is that if the program works, Subway will do a nationwide rollout. The advertising campaign for Subway Now will rollout on Monday with targeted online ads, inside subway (the train) ads and a "massive" online buy. American Express is the credit card sponsor of the program and will offer a free $5 footlong to anyone using an AMEX card.

We will see more partnerships like the one above this year as people try to "save" as much time as they can. Why wait in a line for a sandwich when it can be ordered to your liking and picked up when you want. Everyone benefits in the transaction: you save time, the eatery potentially adds incremental revenue and GoMobo takes a cut of the sale.

Recipe Key provides a recipe database that you can search by the ingredients in your pantry. When you find a recipe you like, the page has checkboxes so you can note which items you already have and which items you need to buy. Another feature I like is the serving size changer. This allows you to select the number of people who will eat the recipe and the system updates the needed ingredients accordingly.

Recipe Key also features an allergen search which is becoming increasingly important these days. You need to create an account to use the allergen search but the account feature also saves recipes you like. There’s also a "My Pantry" feature inside the account which keeps track of the items you have on hand.

It appears that the site is monetized via ads and a partnership with the PeaPod grocery delivery service. Would be interesting to see them approach manufacturers of items on the recipes they list. Instead of suggesting "cheddar cheese" they could display "Kraft cheddar cheese" with a link to a video explaining why Kraft’s cheese is better, etc.

Check out the other recipe sites we’ve covered including NY-based SuperCook and FriendsEat, RecipeMatcher and StartCooking.

Kraft Foods has launched a pretty nifty iPhone application today named the iFood Assistant. The application provides 7,000 recipes and each one has a video demonstration, shopping list and the ability to comment/review comments on each recipe. If you turn the phone to the horizontal view, the recipes switch to index card mode and show you one step in the process on each “card”.

The iPhone application also has a store locator and a snack finder.

iFood Assistant costs 99 cents — not sure why Kraft would charge for the application. It’s a great way for Kraft to push their brands and keep the brands top of mind. Charging for the application will only reduce the take rate. A poor marketing decision in my opinion.

Most people trying to lose weight will tell you that a support system is vital to both losing the weight plus keeping it off. Weight Watchers is a good example of the concept of a support system. For those addicted to Twitter, a couple of new services might help with the support system concept.

TweetYourEats launched in private alpha this week and the service basically takes your tweets about food and can track everything back to an overall food journal. TweetYourEats notes, "We will track your eats, categorize them and/or count the calories too".

TweetWhatYouEat has been around a bit longer and provides similar functionality to TweetYourEats. TweetWhatYouEat provides a public food journal – here’s an example. It would be great to see an export option directly into some of the popular online dieting and fitness sites.

The support concept comes from sharing your food choices with your followers on Twitter. Rather than just posting what you’ve eaten on a traditional online food journal, you are now telling the world, "I just ate a donut". It’s easy to suggest that one only tweets when they eat healthy food, but as any fat person can tell you, if you do that it’s not even worth starting the program.

The key is making food reporting quick and easy and both TweetYourEats and TweetWhatYouEat have done that.

Lunch Time Deals is a new NY-based startup launching next week. The site offers coupons and discounts for local eateries and will launch with a variety of cities including: NYC, Atlanta, Boston and Chicago.

Lunch Time Deals also offers a mobile version which allows you to get the coupons delivered directly to your mobile. Once the coupon is on your mobile device, you show the display to the eatery to have the coupon applied to your meal.

I’d like to see Lunch Time Deals partner with other NYC-based startups who provide restaurant reviews including: Wikipages, Savory Cities and GoMobo.

For Lunch Time Deals to be successful, they need to have enough listings to satisfy both taste preferences and locations. If they can reach a critical mass of both, they could do very well. The service also has to compete with the "super cool menu folder". I grabbed this photo at the Meetup HQ last night. What startup or large company doesn’t have a "super cool menu folder"? Lunch Time Deals needs to get companies to drop the folder and replace it with their service.

Foodzie is a new startup in the process of launching and is part of the TechStars startup incubator out of Colorado. I think of Foodzie as an online food court for specialty foods or you could consider it the "mall" concept from the ’90s.

What I like about Foodzie is that the service will help offline food producers to increase their sales and awareness by working together with other merchants. I could see offline events working well across the world as the Foodzie food court continues to grow. The offline can help to really drive new customer awareness to the food court for future purchases. If the business side is handled correctly, Foodzie could do very well.

The business plan is based on commissions on sales – there are no charges to get the storefront setup. My guess is that they may need to adjust this over time if it’s hard to grab sales for some food merchants. 

There are three keys for Foodzie to be successful. First, it’s critical that the Foodzie staff is marketing the site to get customers to the food court overall. Second, the Foodzie staff has to spend time making sure they continue to find new merchants for Foodzie. It’s also important that there are ways for customers to browse from one store to another to push crossover shopping. Foodzie has a main food court marketplace but when you enter via a store, it’s nearly impossible to jump to other stores. They need to make sure that food discovery is pushed heavily. This benefits all of the merchants and Foodzie as well.

Mr. Frank Gruber interviewed the Foodzie team and I’ve embedded the interview below.