There’s no shortage of lunch delivery options in San Francisco these days, but there’s always room for another one. While most of the options out there are focused on serving individual consumers, Chewse is going after the lucrative office catering field.
A few years ago, first-time entrepreneur Tracy Lawrence launched Chewse in Los Angeles after dealing with a dearth of great food options for her office. After spending hours on the phone with different restaurants and caterers, she decided to build a service that simplifies the process of ordering lunch for businesses.
So she built Chewse, which provides one-click catering for offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The idea is to take out all the friction that usually comes with getting food to an office, creating a sort of “lunch-as-a-service.” That includes pre-vetting restaurants and meals for taste, portion size, serving style, and arrangement.
As a result, office managers can just give Chewse a budget, the number of people in an office, and any dietary restrictions that employees might have. Chewse then builds a meal for users and delivers to offices at a pre-determined time.
The Chewse team partners with restaurants like American Grilled Cheese Kitchen, Rosamunde Sausage Grill, and Mission Picnic in San Francisco, and has signed on clients that include StyleSeat, 42Floors, inDinero and Anyperk.
After serving its 100,000th meal, the company is announcing that it’s raised a total of $1.7 million in seed funding. For its first $1 million, Chewse investors included Chris Sacca, Telegraph Hill, InnoSpring, Ben Ling, Richard Chen and 500 Startups. With an additional $700,000 in funding, the company brought on additional investors like Google Shopping Express founder Tom Fallows, Walmart’s Rocketship VC and Groupon’s Emanuel Stehle.