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With big names like Grubhub and Seamless merging and going public, the restaurant delivery industry is already changing and consolidating. But Venice-based ChowNow adds nuance to the crowded marketplace by not just serving as a delivery tool between restaurants and customers, but as a form of communication between the two.
“People say the true value of the marketplace is all about discovery (introducing a customer to a restaurant), but the discovery piece just doesn’t happen for us because 80 percent of the time people know where they want to order from,” CEO Chris Webb (pictured right) said. “The true value of our tool is the communication tool; we’re not showing the user where to order, we are enabling the order.”
So instead of taking a cut of the sale (aka food order), ChowNow charges its restaurant clients a fee to use the app that simplifies communication with its already loyal customers, much like Verizon would bill a company for cell phone use.
As a communication tool, ChowNow is a total advocate for its clients from the moment they decide to make the move to online orders: ChowNow supplies every restaurant with an iPad and even a decked-out marketing campaign through its in-house marketing team: “We’ve done email blasts, t-shirts, Facebook campaigns, so that their customers know they have online ordering.”
This commitment to ensure that the clients of every restaurant using ChowNow for online ordering or delivery are pumped-up from the start is something that has caused nearly 1,000 restaurants to use the tool nationwide since its public launch last May. And having just launched with a couple of restaurants in Canada to test out operations, ChowNow is next looking to expand to the UK and then eventually to every English-speaking country.
“We have restaurants around the world contacting us via our site saying they want to use our product,” Webb said.
But international expansion would mean raising another funding round or “hitting the gas pedal,” as Webb put it, in 2014. ChowNow already has over $6 million under its belt with support of Upfront Ventures, among others.
With another round of funding, Webb said that ChowNow could easily expand to providing other services for restaurants because the platform has already gathered so much information about restaurants’ customers; for example, it would be a natural move for ChowNow to use these stats to recommend, say, an appropriate marketing budget for restaurant looking to attract new clients: “Getting another round of funding is likely our path and then we would launch in other international markets and expand outside the online ordering realm.”
