Baggot believes the single-line approach to the kitchen is more efficient for the workers and makes better use of ingredients.ĭelivery-only kitchens are certainly getting more popular. ClusterTruck employs the same tactic, rather than splitting the different types of foods into different operations, as is common with ghost kitchens. The food in Google’s cafeteria, despite being quite varied, gets made in one kitchen, with one set of shared ingredients.
“A lot of that has to do with shared ingredients,” he says. His original inspiration came from Google’s cafeterias, whose assortment of food on offer is practically legendary. However, Baggot doesn’t want his company to be the Amazon of delivery. And we all know the ending to that story. It was Amazon who proved internet shopping wasn’t just incremental revenue it was the entire business model. But the department store instead treated the internet as incremental, a side dish to the main brick-and-mortar business. ClusterTruck isn’t the only business thinking of it as the business rather than a small part of business, but the company certainly has an aggressive approach.Īs Baggot sees it, “everyone is sort of treating like Sears as opposed to Amazon.” By that he means that Sears -an “everything you need” store - should have been one of the winners in the early days of internet commerce. Or, a classic case in point, workers contend with Tablet Hell, where multiple devices from multiple delivery services wreck havoc on restaurant operations and hog physical space.īut, as is proclaimed ad nauseam at this point, delivery is only going to become more prevalent. The software used to integrate delivery isn’t the main software the restaurant uses it’s extra. As such, it gets treated as an add-on, which only creates extra friction and complications for the restaurant. At the same time, people are putting up with this because there’s no better alternative.”Īccording to Baggot, the major problem the industry faces right now is that restaurants and delivery services alike treat food delivery as incremental business. “You have this system made up of three constituents: drivers, customers, restaurant,” he says. He also started Tyner Pond Farm, which raises livestock and sells it locally via an e-commerce site.īaggot became interested in food delivery when he realized the current model, driven largely by third-party services such as Grubhub and Uber Eats, is actually quite ineffective for delivering food. Prior to ClusterTruck, he founded the companies Exact Target and Compendium, then sold them to Salesforce and Oracle, respectively. Because the software allows for more precise timing, the drivers don’t even have to get out of the car food is ready as soon as they arrive.Īnd despite doing it all themselves, ClusterTruck service, from order to delivery, is about 20 minutes faster than the industry average.īaggot, a prominent Indianapolis entrepreneur, founded ClusterTruck in 2015, but he’s a software guy through and through.
If food takes five minutes to cook, the time to start the order is when a driver is five minutes away. When an order comes in, kitchen workers wait to start cooking it until the system tells them exactly where the driver is. All those meals can be rolled up into a single order on ClusterTruck, and paid for together (the company doesn’t accept cash payments).īehind the scenes, the company’s in-house software system is calling the shots. You, on the other hand, want cold noodles. So, for example, Sally across the office might want a cheeseburger, and Dan prefers a salad.
You can order as many different types of food as you like, so long as they’re on the menu. To use the service, customers go online and choose from the rather extensive menus ClusterTruck offers. Founder and CEO Chris Baggot believes this vertically integrated approach to food delivery is the most sustainable way to do business over the long term. They create the recipes, write the software that powers their operation, and pay their own set of gig-based drivers. ClusterTruck controls the entire process, from putting menus online to taking orders to getting the actual food to the customer’s door. Rather, the Indianapolis, IN-based delivery-only food service is making a name for itself because of the way it approaches the delivery business. Despite it having the best company name we’ve heard in months, there are no actual trucks involved in ClusterTruck’s business.
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