Beyond Pizza
A restaurant home delivery service for foodies: GrubSquad brings good food toyour door
Here's the situation: You've got an hour, less than $50 and either can't or don't want to run out for food. Until recently your options were pretty much pizza and Chinese food. That's something that GrubSquad and Houston entrepreneur Ogo Ifelayo are hoping to change.
GrubSquad is a dedicated delivery service that has partnered with a small but growing number of local restaurants, including Roots Bistro, Ziggy's Bar & Grill, Sushi Raku, Chelsea Grill and Nabi. Click through the restaurant's menu on the GrubSquad website, place an order, and Grub Squad confirms it with the restaurant, picks it up and delivers it anywhere within 10 miles for a $4.99 fee.
Click through the restaurant's menu on the GrubSquad website, place an order, and Grub Squad confirms it with the restaurant, picks it up and delivers it anywhere within 10 miles for a $4.99 fee.
The idea behind GrubSquad came two years ago, says Ifelayo.
"I'm Nigerian, and Nigerian weddings can get really big," Ifelayo tells CultureMap. "We ordered food from about 10 places and the process can get uncomfortable ordering from different mom-and-pop places."
The entire process takes under an hour, and Ifelayo says that almost every order has been delivered within 45 minutes of when it was placed.
This isn't the first web-based delivery platform, but unlike Takeout Taxi (now Restaurants on the Run) there's no minimum order, and unlike SeamlessWeb and GrubHub, which aggregate existing delivery services, GrubSquad works with restaurants that currently have no delivery option in place. That even includes a few food trucks — Rice Box Truck and Bernie's Burger Bus are new partners.
Ifelayo says that he wants GrubSquad to be for delivery what OpenTable has been for reservations — a service that is linked straight from the restaurants' websites, making everything centralized and easier to navigate for consumers.
GrubSquad will soon offer delivery from even restaurants that aren't company partners, making virtually any restaurant in town (or at least in the Loop) available at home. Ifelayo is also working on an app that will let customers track their order from the moment the driver picks it up from the restaurant.
"They can communicate with the driver, they can text them and have them pick something up, you name it," he says.