Munchery Hires La Boulange Founder Pascal Rigo To Improve The Customer Experience

On-demand food delivery startup Munchery just hired Pascal Rigo, the founder of upscale bakery La Boulange, which Starbucks bought for $100 million in 2012. As part of the deal, Rigo spent three years at Starbucks as its SVP of food to help the coffee giant roll out all of La Boulange’s products in the US. and Canada. They had six years to do all of that, but they finished it in three, so that left Rigo looking for a new adventure. Now, he’s Munchery’s first-ever Chief Customer Experience Officer, and if Rigo has it his way, Munchery’s delivery bags are going to be as iconic as Starbucks coffee cups.

“You feel part of something when you go [to Starbucks] and they have a cup and we have a bag,” Rigo told TechCrunch. “And I think our bag is going to become as iconic as their cup one day.”

Munchery’s gearing up to release redesigned, reusable bags with a picnic table pattern in a couple of weeks. Those brighter bags will also ditch the “Eat Better” tagline for “Delicious Delivered.” Changes like these are part of Rigo’s overall strategy to make the Munchery brand more recognizable and help keep Munchery inside the home, even after mealtime is over.

“What we see today, when people are finished eating Munchery, there’s no trace of Munchery at home anymore — we’re going to the garbage or the recycle bin,” Rigo said. With that in mind, Munchery’s going to start including fortune cookies, printed menus and placemats. He added, “We have a ton of stuff that’s coming that’s going to make us stay at people’s home.”

In Rigo’s new role, he’s in charge of every aspect of Munchery that has a touch point with the customer — from working with the chef to make sure food is great, bringing in new chefs to contribute to the menu and developing new programs.

“For the customer, we want people to think of Munchery as the place to go for everything that’s great food at home,” Rigo said. “That’s why I think in the next few weeks, you will probably understand it better. It’s really to be the best food delivery company in the country. That’s the goal.”

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