“If you use a third-party delivery service, the restaurant is going to cook the food, but they have no idea where the delivery person is or when they’re going to show up. “And we’re seeing that now come across in a really negative way.” “As soon as a restaurant like The Mug uses GrubHub, the customer now belongs to GrubHub,” Baggott said. While Baggott recognized their usefulness, he didn’t understand why food providers would essentially transfer the customer experience to another company, he said. His restaurant - The Mug - gave him first-hand experience working with third-party food delivery services, he said. “So we opened a hamburger stand to help us move that at a retail level.” “Every cow gives me 400 pounds of hamburger, so we were processing lots of cattle in order to keep up with our steak demand and suddenly we had this massive $5,000 bill for freezer space just to store my hamburger,” Baggott said. Slaughtering a cow for steak, for example, creates an imbalance, he said. “Along the way, I had gotten involved in the food movement, read ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ and wound up buying a farm and raising pasture-raised animals and selling them direct to the consumer,” Baggott said “I was always leftover with a lot of product that I couldn’t sell at the volume that I needed.” “All we do is come in and say, ‘Well, let’s just check off all the areas where they’re weak.’ And we have the ability to do that with hindsight.”Ĭhris Baggott, co-founder and CEO, ClusterTruckĪfter Baggott’s previous startups ExactTarget and Compendium Software were acquired in 2013 by Salesforce and Oracle, respectively, the entrepreneur found himself facing a new challenge. “But the consumer is so desperate to have prepared food delivered to them that they’re willing to suffer through all of this,” Baggott said. They’ve created this massive system and this massive demand for delivered food, but if you read their reviews, they’re making a lot of people unhappy.”įood quality, customer service and driver-related complaints are among the top issues for customers of such services, he added. “Like a lot of startups, it’s good sometimes to not be the pioneer,” he said. Unlike its competitors, which are a third party between the kitchen and diner, ClusterTruck controls every step of the chain, Baggott said. Moreover, thanks to a limited delivery zone (largely downtown and the Crossroads, in Kansas City’s case) orders arrive hot to the customer typically five to eight minutes after leaving the kitchen. But ClusterTruck’s novelty is in the company’s cloud concept and machine learning technology that allows it to take advantage of the weaknesses of early arrivers to the industry, said Chris Baggott, co-founder and CEO.įrom a central kitchen, ClusterTruck accepts online orders, preps and cooks food, and dispatches drivers to hungry consumers - all within a matter of minutes, he said. The web- and app-based service joins such meal delivery competitors as Postmates, GrubHub and UberEATS in the Kansas City market. “We are a software company with our own ghost kitchens, if you will,” said Moscoso, general manager for ClusterTruck’s new River Market kitchen, which opened in mid-December without a public entrance or dining area.
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