Jon Cartwright was with friends discussing how common it is for people to get groceries and meals delivered to their homes in large cities such as London and New York when he asked himself why this doesn't happen in Vancouver.
Recognizing this as an opportunity, he took advantage of this need, paired it with the great food the city has to offer and food.ee was born.
Food.ee is an online takeout delivery company that allows individuals and companies to order meals and alcohol from a range of local restaurants and have them delivered them to their doors.
"Our goal is to combine convenience, good food and a bit of nutritional education for people to help them eat better," said Cartwright, the company's CEO.
It serves the downtown area and is particularly geared toward catering for groups, although it does also offer single meals for individuals.
Cartwright said companies such as food.ee can serve a valuable role in an organization by allowing employers to offer food as a staff benefit. He said that this type of perk is becoming more widespread, citing the fact that in tech companies in San Francisco, for example, it is often assumed that employees will be fed every day.
"Workplace benefits have changed over time. Initially it was health care and then it was dental, eye, and more recently it's been around fitness plans," he explained.
"Food is one of those perks and benefits that we're seeing become more and more common in the marketplace."
Offering healthy food as a perk, he said, benefits the company as well as the employee, as the payoff far exceeds the cost in terms of absenteeism, obesity and poor health.
"They also get the benefit of teams intermingling and it's a huge staff retention tool."
Some of food.ee's corporate customers include Lululemon, Tagga Media, CBC and Microsoft.
The small organization uses its salespeople to deliver the food and likes to maintain a very hands-on, personal relationship with its customers.
Cartwright says his company differs from other food delivery companies because it doesn't only offer full menus from which customers order food – you can also request that the website chooses food for you.
"You just tell us the food types [you want] and we take care of the rest, because we already know many of the best restaurants for larger groups," he explained. "We don't actually take menu requests; we build much larger meal plans."
It seems that there is also an appetite for this business model among investors. Food.ee recently announced it had closed $850,000 in funding from a long list of investors, including several in B.C.: Vancouver-based Yaletown Venture Partners; Mike Edwards of Initio Group; and BDC.
The total funding includes $200,000 from an earlier seed round eight months ago.
"That [earlier seed round] gave us enough runway to prove the initial concept, and then we went on to raise the larger money to help scale and accelerate our growth," Cartwright said.
"All the earlier investors participated again and we were also able to get a number of new parties involved."
Food.ee, a recent GrowLab graduate, is staffed by nine 20-somethings and is a spinoff of Invoke Media, the same organization that initially developed HootSuite before it too spun off as a separate company.
Going forward, food.ee's main objective is to gain market share and expand throughout the Vancouver area. In the immediate future, the company plans to expand its sales team and present a more diverse product offering. •
