Saving SF Bay Area Restaurants, One Delivery At a Time

Remember the early pandemic days when ordering takeout was a heroic move to help save local restaurants, rather than just an excuse not to cook? It’s been two years, and we still need that kind of “save the restaurants” energy.

Last year, 120 restaurants closed in San Francisco alone, becoming part of the 10% of restaurants that have closed nationwide during the pandemic. The situation has gotten so dismal that Eater SF began keeping a running list of noteworthy closures in the Bay Area.

Factors like dining room closures, labor shortages, supply chain issues, and inflation have hurt restaurants across the board, but San Francisco restaurants also suffered from the absence of lunchtime foot traffic when tech companies went remote.

But if any region can beat the crisis, it’s the Bay Area. San Francisco-based apps like UberEats, DoorDash, and Postmates came to restaurants’ rescue, but the solution wasn’t perfect.

Beyond Traditional Delivery Apps

As restaurant owners scrambled to find more customers and grow online sales, they found that while the delivery apps boosted sales, they also cut into profits. For some establishments, the tech hurt more than helped. For others, it wasn’t an easy transition. Restaurants that previously relied on foot traffic and word-of-mouth marketing, like Shanghai Flavor in Temecula, would do poorly on delivery apps, lost in an endless sea of choices.

When the pandemic began, the online and phone orders that once made up less than 10% of business for Shanghai Flavor suddenly became the main mode of sales, and adapting was a challenge for owner Lin-lin.

When things took a turn for the worst, she was forced to let most of her staff go. If not for online solutions, Lin-lin feared her restaurant wouldn’t make it through 2020.

One of those solutions was Redwood City-based startup Airmart, which aims to help minority-owned restaurants and produce wholesalers sell direct-to-consumer. The platform gives restaurants access to an online community in the Bay Area to immediately expand their customer base.

The easy online shop setup appealed to Lin-lin, who isn’t entirely comfortable using computers. And unlike DoorDash or UberEats, there are no commission fees to run her own shop on the Airmart platform. Opening an online store allowed Lin-lin to offer delivery and reach new customers over 100 miles away. Since launching on Airmart, Shanghai Flavor’s revenue has surpassed pre-pandemic levels. “This accomplishment was unimaginable for me,” Lin-lin said.

Saving Restaurants with SaaS

Airmart co-founders Leo Liu and Yunliang Jiang both worked as software engineers in San Francisco for several years before beginning to work on the Airmart platform in 2018.

Although the concept for Airmart was designed well before the pandemic was on anyone’s radar, the founders quickly adapted to serve the new needs of their vendors.

“The moment we received tons of feature requests from our local merchants, we knew we were building a product that was helping them survive the pandemic,” said Leo Liu.

Merchants can request new features for their shops that are more specific to their business, like forms for dietary restriction notes or selling meat by weight rather than by unit.

And the platform isn’t just for traditional restaurants. Airmart features bakeries, farms, and meat and seafood vendors as well. Giving Fruits, a nonprofit created to help frontline workers, food banks, shelters, and facilities hit by the COVID-19 lockdowns, uses Airmart to streamline their deliveries of fresh produce and other groceries to those in need.

Revitalizing the Restaurant Industry

The company has even inspired entrepreneurship during the pandemic by giving home chefs a new way to easily sell their offerings online. The couple behind Tarts de Feybesse in Vallejo began by simply selling bread to their neighbors in 2020, and have since been able to expand their bakery venture by building an Airmart store.

Chef Lang, a prominent Bay Area culinary figure whose sushi made Mark Zuckerberg’s personal list of favorites, was able to quit working in restaurants and start selling his sushi on his own through Airmart.

The past two years have tested restaurants, but tech has championed small businesses the whole way through. The pandemic has met its match in the ingenuity of Bay Area software engineers.

About Us

Airmart is a free platform to help chefs connect with their community. Airmart got its start helping minority-owned restaurants and produce wholesalers sell direct-to-consumer during the pandemic and save their businesses. It has since expanded to developing custom features for independent chefs and bakers to showcase their products, collect orders, and facilitate delivery.

If you would like to see a 3-minute demo before launching your free shop, you can book a demo here.