ZeroCater (YC W11) Raises $1.5 Million For No-Hassle Office Lunches

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/10/zerocater-raises-1-5-million-for-no-hassle-office-lunches/

by abstractbill • 15 years ago

146 62 15 years ago

Aloisius• 15 years ago

We use ZeroCater at our SF office. It really does make choosing what to get a lot easier.

They've been feeding me and my colleagues the last couple weeks and I gotta say: pretty awesome. Great variety of food and everything has been delicious. I crow about new food several times a week since they started, and I'm a pretty tough sell.

(And they've stopped asking for that goofy video audition requirement in all their job postings, so props to them for seeing the light.)

xal• 15 years ago

What is the process for employees like? Does food just show up or is there some kind of website / email that everyone gets before lunch?

abstractbill2• 15 years ago

Employees get to see a webpage on zerocater.com that has all of their upcoming menus for the next couple of weeks. On the day the food is delivered, they can use that page to rank the food and comment on it. That feedback is critical to us because we use it to figure out what to order in the future (I tell people we're "Pandora for food").

samstave3• 15 years ago

It would be great to have a premium option where an office can also order some flowers/plants to be delivered as well.

samstave3• 15 years ago

What is the minimum order? I didnt see it in "Learn More" -- I work from home and am a single consultant. Can I use ZeroCater?

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

These guys have been providing us lunches at Blekko and we are a lot happier.

[edit: dang I suck at tenses]

biot• 15 years ago

I assume you mean "we are now a lot happier"?

guimarin• 15 years ago

that said, they need to fix their portioning. We typically get wayyyy too much food. and our vegetarian options are always out of whack with the number of vegetarian's we've listed.

arram4• 15 years ago

Feel free to send us an email any time: hello at zerocater

njharman• 15 years ago

I don't want lunch delivered. Lunch is time to leave the office and socialize with team members I'm not working with all day.

Bill splitting is the service I want.

danilocampos2• 15 years ago

Leaving the office is nice. But who among us has never had this conversation?

"Let's get lunch."

"Okay, where?"

"Chinese."

"Ugh. I don't feel like that today. How about that sandwich place?"

"We were just there on Monday!"

"Yeah. Feel like a burger?"

"That place isn't very good. Kind of expensive."

"Wish there was something new to try."

Then everyone goes back to work.

Then 15 minutes later you realize, ah, fuck, still hungry!

So the appeal with ZeroCater is that with no effort, boom, there's food. And it's often new food. And it's tasty. And you give no effort to thinking about it. So lunch is just a nice, social thing that lasts as long as you want it to without being prolonged by bad service, slow kitchen, whatever.

It's a pretty solid deal. Not a bad tradeoff. Picking lunch can be a miserable affair, especially when you work in a place with thin food options.

Oh, and as someone who was once subjected to truly fucking terrible office catering: wow, what a joy it is to get quality food delivered.

thomasgerbe• 15 years ago

I don't know why you got downvoted. That's a legit concern.

flyingyeti• 15 years ago

Have you tried https://www.paydivvy.com/ ?

cpeterso• 15 years ago

> Bill splitting is the service I want.

One of my phone app ideas (inspired by demoing Word Lens' real-time video translator over lunch) is a bill-splitting app that uses OCR:

1. Photograph the receipt.

2. OCR the items ordered.

3. User clicks the items to group each person's order. Or even cooler: fling items to the side or corner of the phone screen nearest that person (like a card dealer).

4. The app calculates each item groups' total with tax and tip.

Unfortunately, the market for bill-splitting or tip-calculating apps is probably pretty crowded. <:\

EDIT: I see now that an iPhone app that uses OCR to analyze your receipt already exists, though the reviews say the OCR sucks: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bill-split-ocr/id347826835

rdl4• 15 years ago

Another problem with bill splitting is that at some level, the inefficiency can be used positively; I know I always end up paying extra at meals when I can't pay for the whole thing, if the other people are students or don't have reasonable income. It's a lot easier to do that tacitly when there aren't good bill splitting numbers available.

rdl4• 15 years ago

Also, food provided in-office is 100% deductible; meals outside are 50%.

Having great food available daily would be a nice hook to bring in open source dev partners, potential employees (especially passive-recruit candidates), potential clients, etc. I know I've gone to Google and Facebook meals on that basis.

charliepark2• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, how do you categorize expenses such that in-office food is covered? I've wondered this before with coffee (getting in-office coffee as deductible, whereas out at Starbucks is 50% at best). Would be interested to learn how you file these expenses for your taxes.

robryan• 15 years ago

Depends on the day for me, sometimes this is nice to do, sometimes I just want to spent 10 minutes having something to eat and jump straight back into what I'm doing if I have a flow going or a lot on.

gaborcselle• 15 years ago

Congrats Arram and Bill! I vividly remember the "Wave of Food" illustration from Demo Day. If that's not a reason to invest in a company, I don't know what is. (http://i.imgur.com/umToE.jpg)

boredguy8• 15 years ago

I echo the congrats. However, the 'wave of food' was gluttonous and off-putting to me personally. It also features fried food and carbs, which seems to run counter to the healthier trends I've seen. But I'm way on the outside, so maybe i'm missing something.

hristov• 15 years ago

Would anyone from ZeroCater care to comment on whether there were additional difficulties in raising money due to the recent stock market crash?

pitdesi• 15 years ago

I would guess that they almost certainly had all of their commits before the past week and have just announced them now. Too early to see the effects of the crash on VC's in funding announcements imo

arram4• 15 years ago

This is correct. We closed the round more than a month ago.

ericfrenkiel• 15 years ago

Anytime you read about a funding announcement, you can be certain the round closed anywhere from 1 month to 3 months beforehand, and that the funds are now safely deposited.

Consequently, we'll see ramifications later this winter if rounds were negatively impacted.

bretthoerner• 15 years ago

Congrats Arram!

larsberg2• 15 years ago

Are administrative assistants either really expensive or ineffective at meal purchasing in the SF area? This seems like a tasty service and all, but back-of-envelope I would think it hard to compete with ~an hour a day of $15-20/hour labor. Especially since even with this service I still need to pay my admin a half hour for door open/setup/cleanup.

Unless this service is targeted mainly at companies that eschew personal assistant-style employment? I'll admit I've only run teams or worked at companies in the Seattle and Chicago area, where there is an abundance of "young liberal arts grads" to handle straightforward tasks.

I've never done the startup thing, so please feel free to correct me if C-levels are really handling this sort of work themselves (as the testimonials seem to hint).

arram4• 15 years ago

The people ordering food usually also end up responsible for every other miscellaneous task, so are very happy to have someone take care of one of their least important, but most time consuming jobs. One of the most frequent reactions from new signups we see is a big sigh of relief.

The second issue is that someone responsible for ordering food part time isn't going to do it as well as someone who's concerned with nothing else. It's specialization of labor.

rdl4• 15 years ago

There's definitely a period in a startup where founders or management end up handling a lot of minor tasks like this, before hiring admin support staff. I personally would rather pay for services (garbage collection, catering, copier repair, etc.) vs. hiring an admin person to do this, because managing yet another employee (and one from a different background than engineers) adds stress to my life.

If I had a great candidate for admin/manager, maybe I'd consider it, but I could easily see getting to 20-30 employees before doing so.

alexmr• 15 years ago

I can second this. The person who orders food at my company reports it's a huge time sink. We're 50 people and it was taking her hours a day with everything that can go wrong.

kordless• 15 years ago

Yup. We use you guys and totally agree with this statement. You guys have been awesome, and Loggly <3s you!

jonknee• 15 years ago

ZeroCater can promise good restaurants consistent volume and negotiate better pricing than a single business on its own. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to provide the service for cheaper than a PA could, not even counting his/her salary. They may not be doing this currently, but at scale it could be interesting.

lanstein• 15 years ago

a) We're a customer. Congratulations!

b) One major problem that this solves is the randomness factor. We don't have to decide what we want, and if we don't like what we get on a particular day, we can just ask not to have that anymore. It's awesome.

arram4• 15 years ago

Thanks!

mey• 15 years ago

If you are in the Portland or Denver areas, check out http://d-dish.com/ for both personal and catering needs.

Hexteque• 15 years ago

If this isn't the peak of the bubble, I don't know what is.

kapilkale• 15 years ago

Really? Because a company regarded extremely well by its peers and advisors, with a solid business model and clear plans for expansion, raises a seed round?

If you're going to say that when a company announces funding, at least provide some backup.

guiseppecalzone• 15 years ago

This company is killing it. Real, serious revenue and they haven't even scaled yet. Do some research before you criticize.

losvedir• 15 years ago

Funny, of all the recent YC companies I've been reading about lately, this one makes the most sense to me.

They provide a real service that lots of people (judging from these comments) seem to appreciate, which is easily monetizeable. In addition, I can see some great economies of scale here, including cheaper food due to mutually beneficial deals with restaurants.

jvandonsel• 15 years ago

"Lunch is for wimps." - Gordon Gekko

Dramatize• 15 years ago

Am I the only person who brings lunch from home? Eating out every day gets expensive.

abstractbill2• 15 years ago

Individual employees don't pay for zerocater, their employers do.

If you do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation involving the hourly wage of a software engineer (for example), and the amount of time saved by not going out for lunch then it's a no-brainer for most employers to do this.

rednaught• 15 years ago

For those who may have missed a great discussion on "lunch at the office" a few months ago from a Joel Spolsky blog post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2494398 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/04/28.html

timjahn2• 15 years ago

I'm curious what percentage of their customer base is startups and what percentage is other types of businesses (ie, businesses they'll encounter in other markets than the valley).

Will they be signing up all the large ad agencies on Michigan Ave when they hit Chicago? Or is this more for the 10-40 person "in the know" startup?

blantonl2• 15 years ago

I suspect that their goal is obviously to expand into other major metro markets like Chicago and NYC. Thus the funding.

But, you have a good point, being, many companies in the NYC/Chicago area already have very defined pre-arranged catering avenues in place. From the trained executive assistant with a drawer full of menus, to the executive dining room, to the go-to deli on the bottom floor, to the local pizza delivery place. These guys certainly have their work cut out for them with regards to penetrating this market and expanding. I would not be surprised if they are only working the startup ecosystem in San Francisco. It's a good start though.

timjahn2• 15 years ago

Exactly my thoughts. My hunch is these guys are surviving solely from the saturation of startups in San Francisco and the surrounding area.

I'm curious what happens when they venture out into "the real world". Seems to me like a company that survives only in the bubble of the valley. Cool idea nonetheless.

albahk• 15 years ago

An interesting solution from Campaign Monitor solves this problem for them and was coded by an intern...

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2871/how-campaign-m...

pg_bot• 15 years ago

This seems like a perfect company for the culture of SF. I'm not sure how well it will scale to other cities though.

ginkgoo2• 15 years ago

Do people really think working on problems like this is impactful? Guessing the guys running this are pretty smart engineers, bums me out that they are making "solving the office lunch problem" their big hack.

yoshyosh• 15 years ago

This is only the starting point. If such a company were able to hit critical mass, think about the potential they could have feeding residents and helping healthcare monitering. Perhaps even disrupting the concept of needed super markets. The possibilities are endless beyond whats on the surface

ginkgoo2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure the "possibilities are endless". At best they are lowering transaction costs between ppl selling food and ppl buying food. Feels like there are bigger problems out there.

nknight2• 15 years ago

What distinguishes this from waiter.com? So far it sounds like the primary distinction is "you don't get to directly choose what you get every day", which is a big loss.

jackowayed2• 15 years ago

But at the same time kind of a big win. I spend a nontrivial amount of time on picking my food on waiter.com. We also have 2 offices that people switch between, and people order to the wrong office all the time. That would be a little problematic for ZeroCater too (we'd have to be able to give them a sense of how many people will be where on a given day, and a sense of where the people with diet restrictions are going to be), but it's a little more flexible.

nknight2• 15 years ago

But the day ZeroCater misunderstands a dietary restriction, or just shows up with something I can't stand, there would be a big problem.

I intentionally order only things I know I'll like and can eat so I don't go through the day hungry and pissed off. The model of "tell us when you don't like something" might eventually approach something semi-reliable, but in the mean time there's going to be a lot of wasted food and low blood sugar.

Hominem• 15 years ago

This is awesome, but how do they deal building with crazy security. Would I still have to go all the way down to the building messenger center to pick up the food?

espeed• 15 years ago

Congrats Zain!

charliepark2• 15 years ago

I'm not in SF, so maybe this is ignorance on my part, but how common is it for employers to provide lunch for their employees? Is that a Thing now? A few years ago, it was a big part of news stories about Google, how they have in-house chefs and lunch is free to all employees and all that, and that seemed like a big deal at the time. Has "lunch for employees" trickled down to small companies and startups? What % of startups do that? And is there a split between VC-backed startups and bootstrapping startups regarding who does/doesn't do it?

ZeroCater seems like a good solution to that problem ... I just had no idea there were so many companies doing that. Would love to hear experiences of people here.

ZeroCater (YC W11) Raises $1.5 Million For No-Hassle Office Lunches

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