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As Fooda celebrates a $5 million round closed last week, the nearly three-year-old company is also preparing to celebrate the mark of one million meals served to Chicago and New York employees. That is one million agonizing weekday lunchtime decisions made easier by Fooda’s platform which facilitates group ordering of local restaurant food straight to the workplace.
On the brink of this impressive milestone marking the improvement of so many workdays, Fooda is set to rapidly expand its own employee base, COO Jason Stulberg said. He said Fooda’s 30-person team has “new hires joining every week” and will be hiring 50 to 100 next year. Specifically, they are looking to strengthen their UX design, product management, inside sales and Rails and mobile development teams.
Stulberg said half of those new hires will be working out of River North, while the rest will be located in New York and other new markets to be launched in 2014. Although the names of these cities have not officially been announced yet, Stulberg previously said that 10 new markets could be the magic number for Fooda in 2014.
Though concentrating heavily on expanding their team and reaching new markets, Fooda has not been slacking on what it is offering its users here in Chicago and, most recently, in New York:
“On the restaurant front, we’ve doubled our Chicago restaurant network in the last year and expect to double it again as we expand to the Chicago suburbs in the beginning of 2014,” Stulberg said.
Besides giving the ‘burbs some love in the new year, Fooda is also taking steps to become even more enterprise-friendly with its recently launched catering marketplace, which allows enterprises to easily buy and manage corporate catering online.
All this movement was fueled by a seed round from Lightbank, KGC Capital and 500 Startups round earlier this year and will be continually propelled by the most recent round led by Valor Equity Partners: “We started working with Valor at the end of the summer and chose them to lead this round because we shared a vision for how Fooda will transform how we eat while we are at work," Stulberg said.
This transformation is the one that started back in 2007 when Fooda’s founders, Orazio Buzza and Vip Sandhir, were looking to solve their own problem of finding good places to eat lunch while working at Echo Global Logistics. Now, Fooda's corporate customers are known as the fastest-growing and as the best places to work nationally. Coincidence? Probably not.
“Our customers continually rate Fooda their top employee perk,” Stulberg said. “It doesn’t matter if you are at a large HQ location or a small office, Fooda solves the problem of employees having to eat at the same five places and meeting organizers having to order the same old turkey sandwich, chips and a cookie. In addition to a happy workforce, our customers get the added benefit of productivity gains and better culture that comes with employees staying in for lunch.”
