We’ve all been there before. You’re craving a specific food that is being featured with an online offer from your favorite restaurant. You do everything you’re supposed to do: fill out your order, enter your address, payment information, and any additional notes the kitchen needs to know. Finally, right before you click ‘Order,’ you add any simple, reasonable instructions the delivery person needs to know, and that’s it. Now you just sit back and relax – waiting ever so patiently for your order to arrive, right?

Yes, but…

Everything that’s supposed to go right goes completely wrong. The third-party delivery company applied the wrong coupon to your order and the delivery person who you had no clue was handling your delicious meal does one of the following:

• Delivers the incorrect order, which is late and cold
• Drops your food off at a different address
• Fails to drop-off any food whatsoever, takes a picture of a European outlet adapter, and sends it as proof in the confirmation email that your order has been delivered (true story)

It’s a terrible experience, a bad look for the restaurant you love, and it ruins that good mood you previously had after reading “Your order has been confirmed and will arrive in 45-60 minutes.” Unfortunately, we’ve all experienced something like this before. With the rapid shift that’s led to so many more people ordering online, has anyone taken the time to find a solution?

Enter Lunchbox – the innovative company and Sparkfly partner that’s cutting out third-party headaches and giving power back to restaurants and their digital customers. 

THE COMPANY

Launched in 2019, Lunchbox was co-founded by Nabeel Alamgir – former Chief Marketing Officer of a casual dining franchise – and Andrew Boryk, the company Chief Technology Officer. The Lunchbox team entirely consists of people who come from the restaurant industry. This gives the company a unique point-of-view to understanding what customers want and how restaurants should operate in the digital landscape today.

The idea of Lunchbox came from Alamgir’s negative experiences with a third-party delivery company (who was collecting 30% of his restaurant’s commission fees) and their failure to share consumer data. He wanted to create a platform that gave restaurants a way to earn more from their digital sales and rely less on third-party delivery companies who don’t share the valuable consumer data that restaurant owners need to run their business online.

THEIR INNOVATION

Lunchbox developed a platform (enabled with multi-channel integrations that they handle for their customers) that provides independent and small-chain restaurants with “a collection of enterprise solutions that redefine the digital experience” for their customers. This platform comes with multiple integration capabilities with big brands and a Growth-Hacking Toolkit that provides clients with unique marketing capabilities, like: 

Drip campaigns – Automated and personalized emails that help build customer loyalty, trust, and excitement.

Push notifications – Helps keep existing and potential customers updated on special offers, news, events, and more.

Print Marketing – Strategic ads that allow restaurants to swing guests from third-party sites to their website. 

Flexible Loyalty – Provides restaurants the ability to create their own branded customer loyalty offers, keeping customers coming back for more offers. 

Upselling – Learn how individual customers order and receive suggestions based on their purchasing behaviors.

In sum, Lunchbox streamlines the online ordering process for digital customers and the restaurants from which they make their purchases. They do this by collecting customer data through their app, organizing that information, and sharing it with their clients so they can grow sales online – all the while lowering their reliance on third-party delivery companies who charge pricey commission fees. 

PARTNERSHIP POWER

Together, Lunchbox and Sparkfly will deliver secure, engaging, and personalized experiences for restaurants and how they interact with their digital customers. Sparkfly’s award-winning offer management platform allows restaurants to create, distribute, and measure promotional campaigns in real-time. This empowers restaurants with some peace of mind, knowing that all of their special offers are secure and can be distributed across multiple channels so they can connect with all of their marketing technologies. 

Combine this with Lunchbox’s capabilities and you get happy customers who receive unique and personal interactions with their favorite restaurants. 

LOOKING AHEAD

Thanks to the pandemic and its endless list of negative effects, people are ordering food online more often. Restaurants are getting tired and frustrated with third-party food delivery companies who charge overpriced commission fees and share little-to-none consumer data. As a result, customers begin to stray from restaurant websites or build frustrations with the multiple channels they must go through to order food…which will most likely be delivered (or not delivered) in an unfavorable fashion.

It’ll be up to the Lunchbox and Sparkfly’s of the industry to relinquish these frustrations and give power back to the restaurants and the people they serve. So, get ready for the next-gen enterprise of online ordering – because it might just make everything that can go wrong with ordering pizza, right. 

Be sure to revisit our blog as we highlight more creative partners in our Industry Innovator series.