Lunchbox empowers restaurateurs to own their digital experience
Given the current COVID-19 crisis, restaurants need more support than ever. Prior to routine life crumbling, ordering aggregators such as GrubHub, UberEats and DoorDash flourished, bringing both new customers and new frustration to restaurant owners. With extremely high take rates that didn’t adjust to reflect new business versus regulars returning out of convenience, owners started experiencing deep economic pain. Today, as restaurants of all sizes are fighting to stay afloat with takeout and delivery being the only business they’ve got, these challenging dynamics are more pronounced than ever.
With Lunchbox founders Nabeel Alamgir and Andrew Boryk, restaurants have found their champions. The platform they built enables restaurants to operate in a way that truly serves both consumers and owners. Not only are they delivering strong, differentiated consumer experiences, they’re also focused on empowering their underlying restaurant partners to optimize their business and enhance their brands in this rapidly changing landscape. And while you might think that entering the online ordering world at this point would be challenging, we believe that a new player needs to emerge that enables restaurants to do the following:
- Own their customers. Living in a world where the aggregators have all the customer data denies restaurants the ability to understand and market effectively to their customers.
- Differentiate between repeat and newly acquired customers. It’s fine to pay 25–30% take rates for new customers that an aggregator delivers to your doorstep, but when your loyal, longtime customers come back and place an online order, surely the equation should be different.
- Highlight their unique branding. Restaurateurs work hard to build unique brand identities. When a company like GrubHub or ChowNow buries that unique look and feel and customer experience beneath its master brand, the restaurant loses a valuable opportunity.
- Get up and running quickly. In 2020 it shouldn’t take months of integration work and expensive upfront fees to go live with an order management platform. But that’s what incumbents dictate.
- Multi-Platform. First it was web. Then mobile. Now it’s kiosk and tableside coming on strong as rising labor costs create new challenges for ownership. The order management platform of the future needs to enable all of these and whatever comes next.
And that, in a nutshell, is Lunchbox.
Based on the founding team, we can’t say their early success so far comes unexpectedly. Founder Nabeel Alamgir’s journey from busboy at NYC’s Bareburger to becoming its CMO a few short years later demonstrates the hustle, competency, and fearlessness with which the Lunchbox team operates.
And in our current time of crisis, this amazing execution hasn’t been limited to Lunchbox’s core business. Within days of restaurants closing their doors for seated service, Lunchbox mobilized to create Help Main Street, a site that allows supporters to buy gift cards and provide cash support to over 57K small local businesses across 16 countries and counting. At the same time, they’ve launched new functionality to enable curbside pickup and is making onboarding to Lunchbox even easier, enabling new customers who are being flooded with takeout demand to join the Lunchbox family. This is a team who clearly shows up and rolls up their sleeves during difficult situations like the one we are all currently facing.
We are thrilled to welcome Lunchbox to the Primary family, and can’t wait for what’s to come. Beyond what we’ve already shared, here are some key things you should know about the company…
At its core: Software for restaurants to create powerful omnichannel experiences for new and existing customers while battling back the extreme economic tax imposed by online ordering aggregators by combining app, web, catering, and marketing capabilities under one CRM.
Its mission: Overturn the existing fragmented restaurant tech stack with an all-in-one SaaS solution that improves margins, drives customer loyalty and increases orders through owned digital properties.
How: Lunchbox offers a best-in-class digital ordering operating system that often replaces 7+ separate tech vendors. With functionality that addresses web, app, kiosk, text, Facebook, delivery tracking, and intelligent email marketing, it has features that restaurant patrons want and expect and that owners need to make a difference in their business.
Why now: Thanks to labor wage hikes, the rise of prominent and expensive restaurant marketplaces like Grubhub, Uber Eats and Doordash, and limited access to customer data, restaurateurs are facing shrinking margins and more complex/expensive point solutions. Lunchbox provides a consolidated offering addressing these pain points at a much lower cost that’s easy to implement.
The “it” factor: With founders who have worked both in the tech and the restaurant industry and demonstrated a remarkable pace of product progress and operational excellence, the team is uniquely positioned to solve the fractured omnichannel digital ordering experience.
— Brad Svrluga, Primary General Partner and Co-Founder
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