Corporate catering service EAT Club expands to Los Angeles

Steven Loeb · August 20, 2015 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3fa0

The company has hired Larry Sales, former VP at Cooking.com, as general manager of L.A.

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With all of the activity in the food delivery space this year, and there has been A LOT of it, it can become a little numbing trying to tell the difference between one site that will bring food to you door and another. That's because, most of the time, they are basically doing the exact same thing. 

The exception to that is EAT Club, which takes a business oriented view of food delivery, rather than a consumer oriented approach. For the past five years it has been working with a a network of restaurants throughout the Bay Area to curate a new assortment of lunch options available for delivery to offices every day.

Now, for the first time, the company is expanding, announcing on Thursday that it has launched in Los Angeles, and that it has hired Larry Sales as its new general manager of L.A.

Sales was most recently Vice President & General Merchandise Manager at Cooking.com, where he worked with top culinary brands, including Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Starbucks, Food Network, Kraft, Calphalon, and Epicurious, to help them with the e-commerce side of their business.

"I'm passionate about food and one of the things I really enjoyed was the merchandizing of it, so it was a natural fit when the opportunity came about for me to take my passion for food and L.A., and the food in L.A., and bring it to offices. That's the passion I shared with EAT Club, to make that accessible without the hassle," Sales told me in an interview.

"Getting to talk and work with food is certainly a wonderful experience for me."

There are two things that make Los Angeles the perfect fit for EAT Club's first expansion city, he said.

"First, L.A. people are passionate about their food. And, second, it's got a geography that can make it challenging to order. It can take a while to get to food from your favorite place or to get food delivered," said Sales. "Along with those two criteria, you also have the benefit of L.A. being a rich food city. There's a lot of different cultures here, it's a melting pot, and we have the food those cultures bring. The city differentiates itsef by having authentic food, so this is the right place to expand and take the learning the company did from the Bay Area, while also taking notice of what is different in the L.A. market, so we can how we can adjust."

While he couldn't comment on the number of customers EAT Club is expecting to see in its new city, Sales would say that it expects to replicate the success it say in the Bay Area in the next four to six months, before it continues to expand to other cities.

Here’s how EAT Club works: Companies select the program that works for them. Office managers pick the exact number of lunches and/or snacks and delivery timing.

Employees them get to hand-pick the meal they want from top local restaurants, as well as EAT Club’s own professional kitchens, using the company’s online or mobile ordering system. The personalized food options arrive for employees.

The goal of EAT Club is to allow small and medium sized businesses to offer the same perks as companies like Google and Microsoft, who have made food a benefit for their employees, while making it hassle free for office managers. 

"One of the reasons I was interested in this space is there are about 40 million office workers out there, all ordering lunch ever day. It's an area that. when combining that with growth and interest, companies are looking at food as an important part of the benefit of working there," said Sales.

"There’s a direct relationship between the food they bring in and the productivity and creativity of their workers, sand now companies are using it as a way to recruit and retain employees."

EAT Club has so far worked with hundreds of Bay Area restaurants such as Dosa, Bar Tartine and Curry Up Now. Sales would not say how many restaurants it has worked with in all, though, because "we don't think of it that way."

"Some of the folks that do delivery, it is in their interest to have hundreds of partners. We approach it so that we are tailoring a menu that is very balanced and optimized for delivery. It's about getting the right partners who are experienced at getting food out on time and working with us in the system to make it all happen."

The company has so far delivered 3 million meals to companies like Tesla, Netflix and Cisco. 

EAT Club has raised $16.5 million in funding from investors that include Trinity Ventures, August Capital, First Round, Great Oaks Venture Capital, LaunchCapital, Mark Vadon, Tekton Ventures, Wavemaker Partners,  Brian Lee, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Michael Kinsbergen, Niren Hiro and Tekton Ventures.

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