I asked Wang if Caviar furnished or paid any special consideration to the packaging, but he pointed out that all restaurants offer take-away and doggy bags already and thus have supplies even if they don't offer delivery. Wang claims that the average time across all markets is generally 17 minutes door-to-door and only a minute more on average in Manhattan. Once the food messenger left the restaurant, I received an email notification and was able to track his progress via the web.ĭespite the delivery window being an hour wide, my order actually arrived a few minutes early - total transit time was around 25 minutes. Navigating the Caviar website was easy, and the vivid photography really did a good job of selling the food. I placed the order at 11:37 a.m and scheduled the delivery for 2:30 p.m. To test out the service I had food delivered from Momofuku Ma Peche on 56th Street and Fith Avenue to the the Vox Downtown offices on Cooper Square, a distance of 3.4 miles. It took over four hours to document the entire menu totaling over 60 images. "It was the most intense photo shoot we have ever done," says Jake Dell of Katz's Delicatessen, a Caviar client. If nothing else, the website serves as an excellent visual guide to the featured menus. "No one else is doing this," claims Wang. "Photography is in our DNA!" exclaims Wang enthusiastically when queried about the sheer volume of images on the Caviar website.Ĭaviar hires its own photographers for the exhaustive process. In fact, every single dish that Caviar offers for delivery has a corresponding image. And when it comes to choosing a restaurant, one is presented with a clear matrix of choices featuring well photographed shots of the food. Setting up an account is quick and seamless. Much of Caviar's viability comes down to good design - the website looks and feels sleek and contemporary. In general, Caviar selects only one vendor for each type of cuisine. The relative sparseness of Caviar's offerings has the paradoxical effect of making you feel as if you actually have more choice because you aren't looking at 24 places all selling pizza. But Caviar also employs its own fleet of what the company calls "food messengers" to deliver the food, rather than relying on the restaurant to do so.Ĭompared to ordering through rival services, whose bewildering restaurant lists can stretch into the hundreds, ordering food through Caviar is a comparatively straightforward and uncluttered experience. The restaurants Caviar services currently total less than 50 even in its most prolific market, which is San Francisco. There is, of course, the delivery fee and the fact that the restaurants are curated from the perspective of the food enthusiast. The restaurants Caviar services currently total less than 50 even in its most prolific market, which is San Francisco.Ĭaviar is distinct from its most obvious competitors like Seamless Web, Grub Hub, and in a number of ways. Caviar expanded to New York and Seattle in November of the same year and there are plans, although no specific details, to roll out to more major cities while adding a restaurant a week to the roster in each market. According to Wang, the venture reached profitability by the summer of that year. While this might not seem like the most logical resume for entry into the food service industry, Wang is an avid diner with his own food blog and a passion for food photography.Ĭaviar launched with 30 restaurants in San Francisco in March 2013. Berkeley with a background in finance and professional experience with Google. In many cases, the restaurants it features do not offer delivery of any kind, or if they do, Caviar will deliver beyond the usual delivery range. He says this nonchalantly, as if entering the seemingly saturated marketplace of online food delivery with a service that charges a fee, against competition that by and large does not, is a trifling matter.Ĭaviar offers delivery from a curated list of select restaurants for a flat fee of $9.99. "The hard part was picking a name," says Jason Wang, the CEO and co-founder of fledgeling online food delivery service Caviar.
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