Nestor focuses on delivering lunch for office workers in Paris

French startup Nestor just raised $1 million (€900,000) from business angels through Anaxago, and TheFamily. The startup competes in the incredibly fierce market of food delivery startups in Paris. Compared to its competitors, Nestor has a full stack approach and focuses on weekday lunches for office workers.

Nestor’s product offering is quite simple. Every day, the startup puts up a different meal with a starter, an entrée and a dessert for €15 (roughly $16.5). Like PopChef, Nestor cooks everything in-house and delivers hot meals. And that’s it, you can’t choose your entrée, you can’t say no to the dessert.

Keeping things simple has a clear advantage. I’ve ordered from Nestor a few times already, and it’s clear that it solves many logistical issues. On average, Nestor delivers meals in 13 minutes.

Every day, Nestor delivers 1,000 meals and is growing by 15 percent per week. I’ve heard about companies that rely mostly on Nestor for lunch every day. There’s one big caveat, if you’re vegetarian, you’re out of luck.

And yet, Nestor is still quite restrictive when it comes to its delivery area. If you don’t work in the west part of Paris, you can’t order from Nestor just yet. The good news is that Nestor is opening up deliveries in La Défense, the large business district with hundreds of thousands of workers. Now let’s see if the startup can scale its offering if Nestor becomes popular over there.

There are a few advantages when a startup chooses to cook everything itself. While Nestor doesn’t really compete with Frichti directly, everything I wrote about Frichti’s full-stack approach still holds true for Nestor.

Food delivery startups operating in Paris, like Deliveroo, Foodora and Take Eat Easy, need to make sure that restaurants can generate margins using their services. Like in other industries, managing every level of the stack lets you bring the prices down or generate significant margins. Nestor, Frichti, Le Zeste, PopChef and FoodChéri each operate one big cooking and delivery service.

A full-stack approach is also better when it comes to branding. Nestor isn’t just a delivery startup. You’re eating something from Nestor. Whether you like or hate what you’re eating, it’s going to be Nestor’s responsibility. The startup owns the experience.