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Online Food Delivery

Online Food Delivery

Hadi Rashid, co-founder of Lunchbox, on vertical SaaS for restaurants

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Online food delivery apps gained unprecedented prominence at the height of the pandemic as a safer and more convenient alternative to in-door dining. As in-door dining and takeaway make a return amid relaxed social distancing rules, it remains to be seen whether online food delivery apps can maintain momentum. Hadi Rashid, Co-founder of white-label online delivery platform Lunchbox, discusses the company’s founding story, its product and business model, customer base, competitive positioning, and what the future holds. Moreover, he talks about the unit economics of online delivery apps, emergence of SaaS solutions for restaurants, and whether the use of third-party delivery systems will be viable for restaurants going forward.

Lunchbox_Sacra_Profile

The following interview was conducted by Sacra—November 2022

Background

Hadi Rashid is co-founder of restaurant marketing and ordering platform Lunchbox. We talked with Hadi about the rise of vertical SaaS for restaurants, the unit economics of delivery on platforms like Uber Eats and Seamless, and what the future market structure of "restaurant SaaS" is most likely to resemble.

Questions

  1. Can you give us a little context behind Lunchbox? What inspired you to start it?
  2. What did LevelUp do that was so novel and powerful? What capabilities did Grubhub get as a result of acquiring them?
  3. What does Lunchbox do? Who does it resonate with most?
  4. How deep does the understanding among restaurants go to engage in Marketing and Loyalty, especially on the digital side? How old and prevalent is that?
  5. I wasn't just assuming that restaurants were ignorant of all this. There actually was perhaps not as urgent a need to do it pre-pandemic. Is that correct?
  6. Can you talk a little about the kind of bottom line impact of third party ordering? How do those economics work? Did Covid just take unsustainable economics to their limit for a lot of restaurants?
  7. With regard to the SaaS fee, has that ever been like a point of resistance with restaurants whose predilection to paying a subscription recurring fee for softwares may be not as high as another software business? Did you encounter that?
  8. Can you talk a little about the customer base and average size of the company using Lunchbox? Are there specific use cases you can share?
  9. Does an all in one approach—ecommerce companies adopting different integrations keeping Lunchbox in the middle—make more sense for restaurants?
  10. What are some of the biggest places where you might see these software point solutions helping restaurants?
  11. Is there an example, ideally a Lunchbox customer, that’s doing all this really well, that you can share?
  12. Can you see third party delivery systems co-existing with optimized first party delivery systems that use Lunchbox for data collection? Or, will companies move away from third party systems entirely?
  13. In the context of third party ordering, does that customer data get piped into Lunchbox? Or, is that gated inside the DoorDashes and Uber Eats?
  14. Do you see a world where DoorDash etc. recognize that this relationship has become kind of adversarial so enhance data access to their restaurants and invest more in that experience?
  15. What do you think about Lunchbox's strategic positioning vis a vis Slice and Hungry Panda? What are you doing differently from these vertical specific apps?
  16. With regard to the POS systems, do you see Toast or Square etc. as potential competition or complementary products?
  17. Does Lunchbox's online ordering work with both pick up and delivery? If it's delivery, how does that work? Is that contracting out to a third party?
  18. Have you seen that ratio of pick up to delivery change over the last two years?
  19. What will Lunchbox look like five to ten years down if everything goes right? How will the world be different as a result?

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