From the comfort of our beds, we can enjoy authentic North End Italian and classic favorites from Commonwealth Avenue, thanks to Grubhub. Taking on hundreds of locally loved restaurants in the hub, the food delivery system is expanding in Boston.
Launched in 2004, Grubhub is one of the nation’s leading mobile and online takeout delivery apps. It allows the customer to order food from menus of over thousands of restaurants in their area right from their phone or laptop.
The convenience of ordering straight from an app is appealing to the company’s main Boston demographic: students. With that in mind, the company decided to expand in the city last year.
“We’ve actually been with Boston for quite some time, but in the past year have expanded to restaurants that might not have their own operating service,” said Lindsey Ruthen, a public relations associate for New York City-based Grubhub.
Grubhub is able to offer restaurants a delivery service to much larger areas at a much lower cost. In Boston specifically, its recent acquisitions, the restaurants Blue Dragon and Blue Ginger, did not previously have any delivery system at all.
The company is not foreign to the city.
Just last year, Grubhub drove $2.4 billion in sales for local restaurant partners in over 1,000 cities, according to Jaclyn York, an account supervisor at DKC Public Relations and Communications, which partners with Grubhub.
The application aims to expand students’ options for late-night orders.
“While a student might want pizza one day, through Grubhub another day they’re able to place an order for fancy Asian food,” Ruthen said. “You can also order 72 hours in advance, so a busy college student can order then during finals time.”
In addition to the extraordinary amount of additional sales, York said Grubhub cuts the processing time a restaurant would take using traditional takeout by over 50 percent.
However, Grubhub is not alone in the world of food delivery apps. There are many popular options such as Caviar and DoorDash that offer similar services. Last year, Grubhub took a major step to climb the ladder by purchasing a similar company, DiningIn.
“We’ve been happy partnering with the DiningIn company,” Ruthen said. Grubhub parterned with DiningIn in 2015, and has since expanded the Grubhub delivery service nationally.
It’s become almost impossible to find a restaurant in Boston whose food is not found for takeout through the app. Even Trident Booksellers and Cafe, a local favorite part-bookstore, part-cafe on Newbury Street, offers services through Grubhub.
“We still get a bit more people using DiningIn than Grubhub, so they’re still not 100 percent seamless with their merger, but the app has been great to work with,” said Trident General Manager Michael Lemanski. “I wish all other takeout services had apps like Grubhub.”
Among all of Grubhub’s success, some Bostonians still prefer the old-fashioned way of takeout, according to Ted Komsit, manager of Fin’s Sushi and Grill on Boylston Street. He explained that most of his customers still process their orders over the phone.
“We don’t sell that much through Grubhub, but we do sell enough,” Komsit said.
Ruthen agrees with the popular restaurant manager’s point, referencing the culture of American consumption. Americans are currently used to placing their takeout orders through a restaurant’s phone rather than through a third-party app, according to Ruthen.
“We still think our biggest competition is the takeout menu, so there’s still so much more ground for us to cover,” Ruthen said, “We are more focused instead right now on giving our customers a consistent, pleasant, experience, as no one is doing what we do at our scale.”
In addition to the app itself, Grubhub can be found on virtually any social media platform, with their largest following on Snapchat. They were an early adapter to use Snapchat as a marketing media account, and now they have amassed thousands of followers.
There’s no underestimating Grubhub’s expansive scale. The app works with over 1,100 cities, according to Ruthen, and processes over 270,000 orders a day. They currently employ over 800 staff members and still have room left in their stomach.
A previous version of this article stated that Grubhub works with over 11,000 cities and that they’d been expanding with DiningIn since the partnership. The story above has been edited to reflect these changes. We regret the error.
