Interviews

Employers:

Our first employer interviews gave us some insights about the motivations behind providing lunch for employees:

  • Increased employee productivity
  • Better company culture for recruiting efforts
  • Improved health of employees
Further employer interviews revealed significantly different interest levels based upon employer size and industry. The main takeaways boiled down to the following:
  • Large Fortune 500 corporations either have cafeterias already and subsidize them or do not have the ease of offering this perk to so many employees/divisions
  • Very small business owners that are not venture capital backed cannot afford this
  • Small to medium sized businesses are the best opportunity; many were interested, but would still care about cost
  • Federal or government-tied businesses have thin margins and managers believed that a perk like subsidized lunch would be extraneous and unnecessary; currently few offer even free snacks or coffee
  • Manufacturing and operations industry plants all provided subsidized cafeterias on site to keep workers there, so value of extra productivity is already realized
  • Consulting realm that requires employees to be available on-site (and not project-based work to off-site locations) seemed to be a great option
  • Co working spaces are a huge potential for our model. 1776 is willing to partner with us for a trial run at point

Office Coordinators/Event Planners:

From interviews with various roles in different organizations who actually did the lunch ordering and event planning, we learned a great deal regarding current customer pains and desired improvements, along with what is required to convince them to begin using a third party company to help with coordination.

Biggest Pains:

  • Collecting/updating personalized orders (save allergies/custom orders)
  • Clean-up and set-up/distribution (i.e. most delivery methods/caterers do not individually package)
  • Punctuality/Reliability would beat any competitor currently out there
  • Cost of delivery should never surpass cost of meal/s
Convincing Points
  • Not having to go to different vendors for different types/sizes of events
  • Cost effective (don’t charge high delivery fees)…Price points: $10-15 for average lunch, $25-30 for higher end lunch/average dinner, $80+pp  for catered dinner events including service, set-up and clean-up
  • Ease of use/seamlessness for the purchaser
  • More meal options/customization would help sway them from simply ordering from restaurants directly

Employees:

In our search for the right combination of value propositions for all stakeholders the team decided to go to the streets and ask people who work around the downtown area of DC some questions about their lunch habits.
I personally found that the responses these guys gave were very similar.

  1. Lunch needs to be less than $10
  2. They valued healthy choices and quality of food
  3. Their employers didn’t provide any benefits or incentives for lunch choices
  4. Even Split of people who prepare lunches at home
  5. People are not willing to wait longer than 5 minutes

Restaurants:

Restaurants have a bottle neck during peak lunch hours; however, they are not sure how to address this. Most of them understand that they lose customers during peak hours because of long lines. Fast casual were our first targets because the popularity amongst our clients. However, as we interviewed restaurant owners we realized sit down restaurants were looking to partner with us to get traction during lunch time. Restaurants value the quality of delivery service and value the marketing options we are offering them.