New Colby Food Delivery Service: Easy Eats
by Heather Jahrling
New on campus, Easy Eats is a food delivery service and technology business “For the students, by the students.” Founded by a group of freshman including, Christian Krohg, William Maines, and Michael Minard, the service utilizes an app that delivers food from local restaurants straight to Colby dorms. As Maines stated, “If students are busy doing work or are just too lazy to get out of bed, our team will bring them fresh and hot food to their bedside.”
Unlike other delivery services, Easy Eats can deliver directly to a student’s dorm room. Hiring students to deliver, Easy Eats supports Colby students as well as Waterville businesses. One of the drivers for the service, Ethan Beatty ’22 expressed, “I enjoy working for Easy Eats because of the great co workers and flexible hours.” Maines stated, “as far as the Waterville community is concerned, we are connecting local restaurants with the city’s largest spending power.”
Easy Eats has already partnered with many local eateries such as Five Guys, Firehouse Subs, Pizza Degree, Burger King, Jewel of India, and McDonald’s. Maines remarked, “The goal of this project is to provide a premium service to the student body while promoting and increasing revenue for local Waterville businesses.” This mutually beneficial relationship began in October 2018. The founders conducted extensive research regarding development, legalization, and troubleshooting. When the team eventually pitched their concept to Waterville restaurants, they found that “a lot of the restaurants we visited were extremely excited for the project, and we’re quite happy to be working with them.”
To make this project a reality, the team took advantage of Co-founder Christian Krohg’s decade of entrepreneurial and business experience. While the founders are a small group of freshman, Easy Eats has a large team behind them as well including Colby and Middlebury Alumni and CTO, Cameron Zoub. Zoub founded SoleStrike, grossing millions before he decided to drop out of high school to pursue his business endeavors. Zoub’s expertise has been critical in developing and growing Easy Eats. Members of the team such as Krohg and Katharine Dougherty also had the opportunity to refine Easy Eats in their Jan-Plan class “Introduction to Entrepreneurship” with Linwood Downs.
Like any startup, Easy Eats has run into some problems throughout the development of their app and website. However, as Maines stated, “With such a large support group we’ve been able to problem solve everything to ensure a perfect experience for all our customers. If we mess up an order, we are always sure to make it right. We love working without clients to ensure they’re happy.”
To avoid problems, the Easy Eats team intentionally launched the program slowly to increase demand and test their delivery platform. Week by week Easy Eats has seen exponential growth in users. This success has led the founders to formulate new ideas for the future of the brand. Maines said, “Easy Eats has a ton of projects up its sleeves.” Their current objective is improving the customer experience. Therefore, Easy Eats is looking to add more restaurants to its database and become more engaged with the downtown community.
While Colby students have experienced Easy Eats first, the brand is looking to launch the program at Bates later this spring and a handful of other campuses next fall. Regarding the future of Easy Eats Maines shared, “We are already working on developing Easy Eats 2.0 to improve the experience for everyone involved.”
Easy Eats is always looking for feedback from students to improve the customer experience. To contact Easy Eats and gain access to promotional codes, follow them on Instagram at @easyeatscolby or text them at (607)-617–3287 with any concerns or ideas.
