Filling Up

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Filling Up
Delivering at Work: OpenX’s Peter Escartin at the Pasadena advertising tech firm with food ordered through Chewse.

Chewse, a Venice food-ordering service for businesses, is officially expanding operations beyond its Silicon Beach home base to Mid-City, Hollywood, downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena.

More than an ad hoc marketplace for takeout orders, client companies use the Chewse website to coordinate ordering in lunch for large groups, either on a regular basis or for special occasions. The restaurants handle all food preparation and delivery.

“I let them know what my budget is and when I need it here and they get it here,” said Peter Escartin, the office administrator at Pasadena ad tech firm OpenX. “I can just shoot one email and they can plan out the whole month.”

Chewse has been serving the firm for about eight months as part of its prelaunch test of the market, facilitating lunch orders for OpenX’s 240 employees three times a week.

While there are a number of other food ordering and delivery services in Los Angeles such as Seamless, GrubHub and Eat24, co-founder and Chief Executive Tracy Lawrence said that by focusing on serving businesses rather than going direct to consumers, Chewse has carved out its own niche.

“We’re the only solution in Los Angeles that does this,” she said.

Building her client base through direct outreach to businesses and communicating with local restaurant associations and chambers of commerce to get the word out, Lawrence said her approach was easily replicated in other cities. After the regional expansion to Mid-City, Hollywood, downtown and Pasadena, she plans to take Chewse wider.

It’s a model that has few barriers to entry, and Lawrence said she’s guarding against intrusion from giant tech firms such as Google Inc. or Amazon.com Inc. that are entering the same-day delivery market by ensuring her partner restaurants meet consistent preparation and delivery quality standards.

Born in dorm

Lawrence launched Chewse from her dorm room at USC, where she was studying entrepreneurship at the Marshall School of Business, in 2011. Its earliest iteration, coordinating food delivery for school functions and private event planners, worked well enough that she was voted student entrepreneur of the year.

A longtime foodie, Lawrence had previously founded Dish Dash, a mobile platform for students to find restaurant deals, worked for dineLA as a student and also helped plan food service for business school events on campus.

“The catering took me two hours to do,” Lawrence recalled. “It was expensive and hard to find. I thought there needs to be a better solution for this.”

She brought Chewse to the 500 Startups accelerator in Mountain View two years ago and last year raised $1 million in seed funding from the accelerator and San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill Capital, among others.

Dave McClure, founding partner at 500 Startups, said he thought the nature of the business Lawrence had built would keep Google and Amazon from challenging her anytime soon. The upside isn’t big enough for corporations of their size.

“The corporate markets are a little bit narrow for them,” he said.

By shifting away from catering and focusing on serving food from established restaurants to businesses, Chewse is trying to take a bite out of what Chicago consulting firm Technomic said was a more than $15 billion growth market.

“Options for enterprises suck,” Lawrence said of lunch catering services available to local companies. “Any company should be able to keep their employees healthy and happy.”

The service is offered at no extra charge to businesses, so Chewse makes money by taking a 10 percent to 18 percent cut of each order. The commission is negotiated separately with each participating restaurant, and Lawrence said the average order is $600.

OpenX’s said he spends roughly $2,500 to feed the office on Mondays and Fridays, and about $1,800 every Wednesday, “pizza day.”

Jarrad Hirschman, catering manager at Colony Café in Los Angeles, said Chewse now accounts for roughly 25 percent of its catering business.

“It’s been reasonable and worth it to us,” said Hirschman, who’s partnered with Chewse for about a year. “We wouldn’t do it otherwise.”

The company, which has relationships with about 90 restaurants, said it is adding about five more each week.

Among the participating restaurants are Bergamot Café in Santa Monica as well as West L.A.’s Nong La Cafe and Fundamental LA.

Lawrence said Chewse evaluates new eateries through its “taste tester” program, where businesses can opt to try out restaurants and offer feedback.

“Customers get the final say,” she said.

Lawrence declined to say how many businesses order through Chewse, though she said the number has doubled over the last six months.

Tech firms make up a big chunk of the clientele – Shopzilla Inc., Activision Publishing Inc., Factual Inc. and JustFab are some of the many big names, but major private equity firms such as Gores Group and Leonard Green & Partners are also customers, Lawrence said.

Escartin said the service has allowed him to spend more time on important tasks such as coordinating events that help develop office culture, including a meetup with local industry group Innovate Pasadena.

“They do seem to kind of veer toward the tech and startup industry for the most part,” said Colony Café’s Hirschman of his Chewse customers.

Lawrence said workers in the tech, financial and legal sectors typically put in long shifts, which puts an added responsibility on their employers to ensure that they are well-nourished.

“People are spending so long at work,” she said. “It’s a great thing for an office to say let’s take that burden off of you.”

Lawrence spends half her time at Chewse’s San Francisco office in preparation for the company’s planned expansion to the Bay Area in about three months – and she doesn’t want to stop there.

“I want to nourish the nation’s workforce,” she said.

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