Connect & Eat

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Inspiration

Problem & Opportunity Story for Local Restaurants

The pandemic has negatively impacted local restaurants as the inability to stop the spread of Covid-19 has put continuous limits on capacity, increased the fear of indoor dining. Meanwhile, effective delivery services are also cutting into already thin margins. But as ~42% of the US workforce worked from home throughout the pandemic (Davidson, 2021), lunch eating habits have changed. Employees have stopped picking up lunches with colleagues, and are instead eating lunch straight from the refrigerator and snack pantry (Redman, 2020). How might Connect & Eat start changing work from home behaviors to bring lunch customers to the local restaurants?

Problem and Opportunity Story for Organizations

As the trend to work from home continues, employees face increased feelings of isolation, which impacts resilience; a lack of spontaneous social interaction impacts innovation; and no free lunch, which impacts morale and the feelings of connection to their organization. How might we create experiences for working from home employees that connect them to each other and their employers?

What it does

Summary: Connect & Eat partners local restaurants with mid to large organizations to offer their distributed employees free lunch. However, Connect & Eat is NOT built on providing efficient meal delivery services for businesses like Uber for business and sweetgreen outpost. Instead, it is about creating community through these 3 critical components of our business strategy.

Partnership with Local Restaurants The first is creating partnerships with neighborhood hidden gems (i.e., restaurants). Our service highlights restaurants with amazing food as well as those that belong to historically marginalized communities that have been negatively impacted by the pandemic. Our app is designed to showcase those restaurants' stories and the food served. Connecting to the food we eat and the stories they tell is good for the soul. Also, Connect & Eat helps these local restaurants curate a menu that meets the needs of each specific organizational partner (e.g., delivery time, type, quantity) as well as strategically streamlining costs through a fixed menu with limited options. Our process is designed to enable innovative thinking for each local restaurant we partner with. How might they tell their story through their menu? Our app also showcases all of our partnered restaurants, creating an informal network and increasing their visibility to potential customers, even when they are not highlighted that day.
Partnership with Mid to Large Organizations The second component is delivering a needed service for organizations that use the crowd pleaser of free lunch to connect with WFH employees. This means we do not offer personalized delivery to a home or apartment. Instead we create Connect & Eat Spaces (CE Spaces). These are selected locations that represent organizations' WFH staff locations. Our strategy uses a short 20 min pick-up time window to enable spontaneous social connections of colleagues while they pick up their food. Think about picking up your food and realizing “I didn’t know you lived in the area - let's grab coffee sometime”...
Technology, Logistics & Costs Although this is a partnership-first, experience focused solution, the third critical aspect of our business is our easy to use, accessible phone application. As a nudge, we use automatic emails sent in the morning that organizations are offering free lunch. All they have to do is click on a link that takes them to the phone or web application in which they can place their order and select the CE Space. Pick up times are not changeable (e.g., pick up @12:30 and this time is decided by the organization based on employee lunch habits/norms). At first we plan to use our own delivery vehicles and drivers, but as we scale we would be open to collaborating with emerging food delivery services that align with our values. Our viable business strategy passes on our cost of 3-5% per order + a fixed cost per CE Space on to the organization, not the small business.

Intended Impact

Our intended impact is to increase visibility (think about the employee slack buzz), potential short term and long term customer base, and enable innovative thinking for our partnered local restaurants. But it’s more than that, by offering work from home employees free lunch, they feel seen and valued by their employer; by walking to CE spaces, we are decreasing stress; and through our intentional design, we are creating a vehicle for informal connections.

How we built it

Two members of our team built an app prototype through Figma called, “Connect & Eat” and two members offered input in ways to align the app to the Connect & Eat story. The Figma prototype offers an insight into the user experience of the employees and shows how Connect & Eat would highlight the restaurant's story.

Challenges we ran into

The challenge we ran into was distinguishing ourselves from other major players in the meal delivery space such as Uber for business. Due to the pandemic, meal delivery services are on the rise and so it was critical to communicate how our solution was different and how it served and supported the community we are trying to impact. Our team thrived on the momentum of having limited time, but was challenged by the 60 second video limitation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team came together for the first time on Sunday night. We didn’t know each other, we had different areas of expertise, no ideas, and resided in different time zones with varying work habits. Our ability to align on a vision, self-organize based on passion and expertise, and get the work done in such a short window was an accomplishment. But not only that, we did it with respect and trust; our team bonded and connected. We even took an extra step of receiving valuable feedback on our pitch by testing our solution at a Toastmaster meeting. We are proud of the ways our team came together and brought our full selves to the process.

What we learned

As a team, understanding when and how to showcase our story, business strategy and technology was a challenge that our team learned from. Through our feedback from Toastmasters, we learned how to think about a 60 second pitch. We also learned how to use technology to tell our story rather than offering a typical demo.

What's next for Connect & Eat

The next step for Connect & Eat is to move into breakfast, coffee and snack breaks. As Connect & Eat grows, a possible strategy could be creating more formal experiences with our partners (e.g., 45 min food tours, coffee tasting or eat lunch with a random colleague lunch generator). We plan on conducting additional research to figure out if it is feasible to extend our scope to beyond food service, and into other small industries (e.g., clothing, herbal products, etc.). We are also looking to add nudges that would encourage individuals to go out for a walk, as well as find an outdoor green space to eat lunch.