Hope you’re hungry. Gourmet, on-demand dinner delivery service Sprig today expanded to start serving lunch, just as we wrote it would a few days ago. The soft-launch of lunch includes service to several districts of East San Francisco from Monday to Friday. The move puts Sprig in direct competition with SpoonRocket, which also delivers on-demand lunches and dinners — a space we expect to heat up this year.
For more on the magic of getting a hot, tasty, healthy meal delivered in minutes for a price cheaper than most restaurants, check out my scoop on Sprig launching lunch from last week. Essentially, Sprig and SpoonRocket cook huge quantities of a few entrees, and load them into cars that drive around their service areas so they’re always close by. You choose what meal you want to eat from Sprig or SpoonRocket’s site/app, and it’s brought to you lickety-split.
Sprig’s co-founder and CEO Gagan Biyani tells me “The mission is to make eating right the easy option.” While Sprig and SpoonRocket are competing with each other, their success will more depend on whether they can disrupt the existing ways to eat at home: cooking, take-out, and standard restaurant delivery. Biyani tells me his customers are “currently unsatisfied with their options”, and that’s why they’ve turned to his startup and given it a 5-star rating on Yelp.
Compared to SpoonRocket, Sprig has slightly longer delivery times and high prices but tastier food. The problem is it only served dinner. But starting today, it will deliver lunches 11am to 2pm, Monday to Friday, in San Francisco’s Financial, SoMA, Mission Bay, and Dogpatch districts with zip codes 94103, 94104, 94105, 94107, 94108, 94111, and 94158. That’s a more constrained area than it serves during dinner.
Customers will be able to choose from a rotating set of three sandwiches, wraps, or salads each day, with at least one vegetarian and gluten-free option available. The price is around $9 per meal plus $2 for delivery. For example, today Sprig featured a steak and manchego sandwich, a balsamic chicken sandwich, and a beet salad with orange and faro. Our writer Ryan Lawler sampled them this morning and found the sandwich tasty, and nothing wrong with the salad. Both included ample portions.
With both Sprig and SpoonRocket having raised funding rounds of $10 million or more in the last month, you can expect them to try to streamline their supply chain and market aggressively in hopes of attaining the coveted title of “Uber For Meals”. Biyani says the company is actively hiring for product, design, engineering, and marketing roles, but the hardest part of his job is smoothing out the logistics. “Food is a complex business that requires sourcing the best ingredients, making hundreds of meals, and delivering those meals quickly and efficiently” Biyani admits
“We’ll do whatever it takes to provides people with a healthy delicious meal, any meal of the day, as fast as possible” the founder exclaims. But wait, Sprig only does lunch and dinner now. Does this mean breakfast is on the roadmap? I could practically hear Biyani’s smile over the phone when he replied “I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually we figured out a good solution to breakfast.”