Chef Shuttle, a restaurant delivery service, is expanding its business in the Memphis market. The company will now be serving the downtown and midtown Memphis areas with five restaurant partners, Dunkin Donuts, Gigi’s Cupcakes, Hard Rock Café, Kooky Canuck and Pita Pit.
Chef Shuttle is an independent meal delivery service that partners with restaurants to deliver meals to homes, offices and hotels in defined geographic areas. The entire restaurant menu is available for delivery from all participating restaurants, and the geographic boundaries are created to ensure timely delivery and maintain the food quality of the restaurants.
The company was founded and is still headquartered in Little Rock. Their Memphis office is located in Collierville and employs four full time staff solely dedicated to the Memphis market. Chef Shuttle entered the Memphis market in March of 2015.
The choice to expand in the downtown and midtown areas was based on serving current customers while they are at work. "Chef Shuttle Memphis started delivery in the Memphis suburbs and we have thousands of active customers. Most of our customers that live in the suburbs work in downtown or midtown. Opening these new areas allows our current customers to now use Chef Shuttle for lunch when they are at their office. We are expanding in Memphis because of requests from current customers, restaurant partners with locations in the downtown/midtown area and drivers who are willing to work in our new delivery areas," said Ryan Herget, President and CEO of Chef Shuttle.
Chef Shuttle has partnered with more than 50 delivery drivers stationed throughout Memphis and because of this growth addition they expect to double their driver force within the next three months.
“We are excited to be expanding our geographic footprint to the Memphis mid and downtown, and look forward to rapidly expanding our restaurant partners in that area,” said Herget. “With lunch service, we will be meeting that unique need for the thousands of workers in downtown who have the desire to patronize downtown restaurants, but often do not have the time to leave their offices.”
An employee in the Memphis office focuses solely on adding new restaurants to the roster. "Studies have shown that most of a restaurant’s customer base lives within a 5 mile radius of the restaurant. Chef Shuttle allows restaurants to double or triple that radius and get their food into households that typically would not make the drive to the restaurant," Herget said.
Across the entire metro area they now have nearly 75 restaurant partners, and are expanding regularly.
Herget, 25, started his first business eight years ago. He created the Chef Shuttle infrastructure when he realized that consumers no longer were satisfied with receiving their product two or three days after purchase. "The company was started with the objective to build a core infrastructure that is capable of facilitating the last mile delivery of multiple products," he said.
While food delivery is their current and core model, they have plans to expand into grocery delivery, floral delivery and liquor delivery.
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