EatStreet: A Main Street Solution in a World of Giants
Can a small college startup take on billion-dollar giants? EatStreet proved it could. This American online food ordering platform launched with a clear mission: empower small-town and college-town restaurants with modern ordering technology. While the big players focused on metro mark …
How Waitr (ASAP) Became a Small-Town Delivery Giant
What if the secret to building a delivery giant is starting small? Waitr’s story proves that sometimes the biggest opportunities lie in the markets everyone else overlooks. Founded in Louisiana and eventually rebranded as ASAP, Waitr grew from a local idea into a Nasdaq-listed company …
Fantuan: From Craving to Super App for Overseas Chinese Communities
In 2014 two Chinese international students at Simon Fraser University – economics student Randy Wu and friend Yaofei Feng – turned a simple craving into a company. “At the time, we didn’t have [delivery] service,” explains Feng vantechjournal.com. They saw that mainstream apps in Cana …
The Global Success Story That Started with a Craving for Real Chinese Food
Ever craved authentic home-cooked food far from home? HungryPanda’s journey began in 2017 when University of Nottingham student Eric Kelu Liu asked, “Why can’t ordering Chinese food abroad feel like home?” Frustrated by clumsy translations and a lack of local options, he built a deliv …
Too Good To Go: When Doing Good Became a Business Model
In 2015 a small group of Danish entrepreneurs stared at towering piles of buffet leftovers and asked, “What if this waste could be value?” In Copenhagen they sketched out an idea: an app to rescue unsold food. By early 2016 Too Good To Go was born – a pocket-sized marketplace connecti …
From Fridge Leftovers to a Global Food-Sharing Movement: The Olio Story
Imagine unpacking boxes at your new home, only to be told that perfectly good food must go straight in the bin. This was Olio co-founder Tessa Clarke’s “lightbulb moment” in 2014aboutamazon.eu. Frustrated, she asked herself: “Why isn’t there an app I can use to share food with someone …
The Rise of Kitopi: Dubai’s Cloud Kitchen Powerhouse
In 2018, four friends in Dubai saw a massive gap in the food delivery market. Restaurants struggled with delivery logistics, inconsistent quality, and fragmentation of tools. They founded Kitopi (“kitchen utopia”) with a bold mission: “to power the food economy by revolutionising the …
Quicklly: South Asian Marketplaces Show How Niche Wins Big
Quicklly sprang from a simple origin story: two South Asian entrepreneurs in Chicago saw an underserved community’s pain and built a marketplace to fix it. Founded in 2017 (launched 2018) by Keval Raj and Hanish Pahwa, Quicklly set out to solve the diaspora’s food-shopping and dining …
Club Feast: When Planning Lunch Beats Paying For Chaos
“The future of food isn’t fast — it’s smart.” In today’s on-demand frenzy, delivery apps promise convenience but deliver chaos: sky-high fees, cranky drivers racing around empty, and restaurants choking on unpredictable orders deliverect.com switchgearmarketing.com. Every hour they sp …
Shef: The Home-Cook Revolution Feeding America
Imagine craving your grandmother’s adobo or a fragrant bowl of Ethiopian shiro, and finding it served fresh by a neighbor down the street. What if your weekend takeout came from around the world — not from a chain, but from someone’s home kitchen? That’s the revolution Shef has sparke …