Over the summer, Square purchased food delivery startup Caviar. Today, it’s making ordering on the service even easier with the launch of a mobile app.
Square announced the acquisition of the curated food delivery service in August for a reported $90 million. Since then, the service has been adding new markets that it’s available in and now has an iOS app to enable customers to place orders from their mobile phones.
Caviar differentiates from most other food delivery services by partnering with highly rated, mostly fancy restaurants. The company works with those restaurants to become their exclusive delivery provider, arguing that it can enable restaurants to serve new customers while providing a better quality of experience to end users.
The service also let users to share a link with others so they could add together food requests under a single order. That particular feature is popular with the work lunch crowd, as office workers combined orders that would be delivered together.
Until now, however, Caviar’s service was only available on the web. The launch of an iOS app will change that, putting it on par with a number of other food delivery apps that have sprung up over the past few years. Like many of those apps, Caviar will allow users to see the status of their delivery and follow along the courier’s route.
Launched originally in its home market of San Francisco, the service is available throughout the Bay Area, as well as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington D.C. Along with the introduction of the mobile app, the company is also launching service in Brooklyn.
For Square, the purchase of Caviar and introduction of the mobile app comes as the company has attempted to diversify its business beyond being just a payment processor. While Square is best known for its mobile credit card reader, over time it has added a number of apps to enable and extract payments, as well as new services like ordering ahead and food delivery.