Two met a demand created by the COVID-19 pandemic, while two others started their delivery businesses before 2020.
They all saw a need on or around their campuses that wasnt being filled.
Heres what they did.
Will Gentry delivers food from local farms around Lexington, Va. Customers place orders on a website, then Gentry and partner Gray Carlton buy all the produce, sort the goods to assemble each order and deliver it all the same day. Photo courtesy of Gray Carlton
4 Successful Examples of How to Start a Food Delivery Business
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We started brainstorming, thinking of what would be a good way to get their products to people.
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They were extremely excited right off the bat.
I was kind of surprised, Gentry said.
I figured they were going to be set in their ways.
But they are always looking for more sales avenues.
The boys started a Facebook page, built a following in the community and collected more than 100 emails.
Heres how the food delivery business works:
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We dont hold any inventory.
Its really unique, Carlton said.
They charge a $7.50 delivery fee, plus a markup of around 18% of the total order.
The domain name cost $10.
We also wanted some protection (from possible lawsuits) because we were handling food.
Not that either of us has too much to protect, Carlton said with a laugh.
Thats beneficial because theres a pretty strong small business community in Lexington.
Sometimes I do think about how we could build a bigger business out of it, Gentry said.
At first, there was very little technology involved.
After a proof of concept was established, Antico got involved.
I went to (Boston College) and said we proved there is a demand for this.
So, the college added a delivery option to the app students could already use to order food to-go.
The first taker delivered the food and made $3.50.
I set up kind of a dorm room on the main quad and called it the Day of GET.
J.B. lived in a tent, we had a TV set up outside, Antico said.
We delivered all the meals to J.B. for 24 hours to showcase how useful the service could be.
People walked by and wanted to know more about it.
At its peak, BC GET had about 25 orders a day.
Getters could make around $500 a semester.
The founders made more, of course, though Antico declined to say how much.
The delivery business, however, must have looked impressive to potential employers.
I saw a clear-cut opportunity right there.
I started an Instagram page and made some posts saying Id shop and deliver groceries, Chionchio said.
He delivered during a timeframe he set each day around his online classes.
He also accepted handwritten grocery lists.
He charged a 15% fee based on the grocery bill for his delivery services.
I made a lot of traction after a couple weeks, he said.
Once I got six orders a day, I hired five drivers.
They were all friends or friends siblings.
OnceNewsdayhit, the demand went up like crazy.
I hired about 50 drivers, Chionchio said.
He also hired two administrative assistants to help process orders and verify drivers insurance and licenses.
Then Fox business anchor Neil Cavuto featured an interview with Chionchio.
That was national, he said, and demand went up even more.
We stopped advertising for a while.
We were still in the process of building the infrastructure, and I was still in school.
The customer app is called Smartshopcustomer.
Zhang took him up on it.
It just had my phone number on there and said to text me.
He hired other friends to start delivering and make $50 to $100 a night.
At first the orders were all texts to Zhang who passed them on to other delivery people.
Then a computer science student who was a frequent customer built an app for the business.
Zhang skipped class one day to go seeShark Tankinvestor Mark Cuban andSurvivorproducer Mark Burnett speak on campus.
At the end of the presentation, they took impromptu business pitches from the audience.
On the spot, Burnett invested $100,000 for a 10 % stake in EnvoyNow.
Zhang received a lot of publicity and soon the Thiel Fellowship offered him a $100,000 grant.
He left USC in 2015 and expanded EnvoyNow to 22 campuses, according to a recent interview with Medium.com.
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