A bit squeamish about taking your turn as the office takeout-order placer?
Afraid of not getting the boss”™ order right?
Always stiffed by the guy in sales who never pays his fair share?
Well, Bunky, the solution to your anxiety is just a click away, according to Frank Blot.
Allmenus.com is about to debut its Web 2.0 version that could have everyone dumping their menu-strewn desk drawers into the office recycling bins.
Blot is the chief executive officer of Dotmenu Inc., a privately held company based on West 19th Street in Manhattan. It is composed of itself, campusfood.com and allmenus.com.
It has already proved itself as a sustaining model ”“ “everybody has to eat” ”“ among the college crowd, having been born from a late-night tuna fish sandwich takeout debacle for University of Pennsylvania junior Michael Saunders, today founder and president of the company. He launched the company in 1997.
Blot joined Dotmenu in January 2006 after leaving Vivendi Universal Games, where he was executive vice president of international business development. With 450,000 restaurants in the United States, Blot suggested a broader focus for the company. Eleven months later, the company expanded the brand to allmenus.com to accommodate the rest of the eating world not in college. “There”™s more people out there than college kids,” he said.
Allmenus.com boasts 217,982 menus in 7,729 cities. It is now making a marketing push into White Plains and features 138 of the city”™s food establishments; of which not all are pure restaurants, such as Dunkin”™ Donuts and Ben & Jerry”™s.
Its competition in the New York City market includes Delivery.com, formerly NYCTOGO.com, MenuNetwork.com and SeamlessWeb.com, which are limited in their menu selection and geographic reach. SeamlessWeb, according to its site, serves “all of Manhattan and selected areas of Brooklyn, Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia and Greenwich, Conn.” Delivery.com doesn”™t specify its reach.
Blot said his company exists to bring people to restaurants by using technology and building awareness. The Web site breaks down the restaurants by cuisine and also offers customers the chance to comment on the individual menu items. Blot calls it “supportive marketing,” or the power of community as outlined by James Surowiecki in “Wisdom of the Crowds,” whose subtitle says it all: “Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations.”
The company makes its money by charging participating eateries a monthly fee, taking a 5 percent cut of the subtotal of each order placed as well as a fee for handling credit card transactions. The company just marked handling its 6 millionth order.
Blot says the company drives customers to restaurants via the online network where they can choose to order takeout, pickup or view the menus and eat at the restaurant itself.
The company is also taking advantage of text messaging ”“ a big hit among the campus crowd ”“ and could catch on among commuters returning from New York City to White Plains. Blot said if commuters time it right, they can text the order and have it arrive at their homes shortly after they get through the door.
The company is marketing to two segments, he said: the consumer with two children who orders dinner meals; and the urban professional, a single person who orders late or is trapped at work and orders takeout for lunch.
Blot feels White Plains has great potential because it has a base population of 56,000 that quadruples during the day when the corporate parks and commercial buildings are buzzing with workers. As an incentive for corporations and businesses to become customers, the company is offering “free lunch,” a chance to meet with a marketing executive and get a hands-on feel for the site as well as lunch for six to eight employees with the tab picked up by allmenus.com.
Campusfood.com gained some stickiness last September when it became a Widget for Apple computers with OS X Dashboards.
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