New York, NY — Lunchbox, the “Shopify for restaurants,” debuted its omnichannel digital platform for the food industry–a response to third-party ordering apps that have cut deeply into restaurants’ profits and taken control of customer relationships.
Lunchbox eliminates eateries’ reliance on ordering apps–like DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats–by making it affordable for restaurants to bring digital ordering to their customers directly–via mobile app, web, and in-shop kiosks–as well as built-in, automated marketing campaigns so restaurants can build their businesses and reward regulars. Lunchbox also integrates with “last mile” delivery companies, like Relay, when eateries don’t have their own delivery staff.
“For the past twenty years, third-party ordering apps such as Seamless have charged participating restaurants hefty fees–around 30%–leaving food providers a mere 5% in profits off those online orders. Additionally, these third-party ordering apps don’t share customer data with restaurants, which would allow them to send deals to customers,” said Andrew Boryk, co-founder and CEO of Lunchbox. “Lunchbox equalizes the playing field by offering an easy, affordable range of services that weren’t within reach before, whether it was a lack of business development savvy or coding skills.”
After a soft launch in February, Lunchbox has signed more than 100 restaurants nationwide, including major chains like Bareburger, Sticky’s and 16 Handles. Participating restaurants have been able to boost online order revenue by 25% per month, create on-brand menus, and engage customers through easy-to-execute email marketing campaigns–an expertise that restaurants generally lack.
“We needed a white-label digital platform that would help Bareburger meet the needs of the modern customer, but found that there were no affordable, omni-channel Software-as-a-Service solutions on the market. Our options were to either spend a million dollars on building out an ordering platform and hire a marketer, or contract upwards of five different firms that would work in silos,” said Euripides Pelekanos, CEO of Bareburger. “Lunchbox is the first provider to offer it all, with packaged options that let us–not other companies–serve our customers directly and access food trends data to learn more about them, without the overhead of on-staff developers or marketing professionals. Since we’ve started using the service, we are on track to save $1.86M annually.”
In addition to its user-friendly features on the seller side, customers can enjoy the same benefits of third-party ordering apps, like tracking their meal in real time and earning points toward rewards programs.
Restaurants are looking to offset costs now more than ever, with the introduction of wage increases piled on top of lost profits brought by third-party ordering apps. Until now, there has been no comprehensive solution for the restaurant industry that meets budget constraints, provides a customized platform and helps business owners implement marketing campaigns using customer data. One example is Panera, a national chain that spent more than $100M over six years to build out their direct-to-customer platforms, more than double their original budget.
About Lunchbox
Lunchbox makes it possible for restaurants to take control of the ordering experience by creating omnichannel experiences for existing and potential customers. The user-friendly SaaS platform also empowers restaurant owners to deploy effective marketing campaigns, all within an on-brand, personalized format. For more information, visit Lunchbox.io.
