What if picking up a morning latte and donut at your favorite hole-in-the-wall coffee shop was as easy as pushing a button on your smartphone during your commute to work?
Thanks to
, a Toronto-based company that just launched in Chicago, your morning routine might’ve just gotten a whole lot easier.
And it's not just mornings. Ritual works during normal lunch hours, helping workers downtown order and pickup meals more efficiently.
Companies like Starbucks already have apps that offer similar order- and pay-ahead options, but that app doesn’t quite help you skip the line at the artisan cafe next to your work any faster.
Ritual is aiming to bring that Starbucks model to coffee shops and restaurants the city over, with the hopes of making daily coffee runs and lunch breaks more time-efficient and cost-sensitive.
“We enable that type of experience and have all the supporting technology available to offer that for every other restaurant and coffee shop,” said Josh Sookman, Ritual’s head of expansion.
Even as on-demand delivery gains in popularity, Ritual is betting on pickup as a viable alternative to paying a couple extra bucks daily for delivered meals and drinks.
The company, which quietly arrived in Chicago in October of 2015, spent the past few months building up both a presence and reputation across the downtown area — first in River North, then the West Loop, and finally the Loop (a district Sookman said was critical to establish prior to the official expansion announcement on Tuesday).
“It’s hard to say you’ve launched in Chicago without being in the Loop,” he joked.
By November, the company was already shouldering thousands of orders from various merchants. Since then, they’ve partnered with more than 275 merchants in Chicago — 100 of which call the Loop home.
Sookman said they’d seen similar successes in Toronto, and given Chicago's demographical similarities to their home turf, the Second City acted as a perfect city for their first expansion.
And Ritual offers more than a boon for the corporate employees looking for coffee, lunch, and dinner who can now peruse drink and meal options from hundreds of locations across the city.
Businesses, he said, benefit too.
Not only can they keep their downtown workers happy and social by offering lunch or dinner credits at various locals haunts, but Sookman also said that businesses benefit financially from integrating with the app — in some cases, to the tune or a 20 to 25 percent lift in top line revenue (after working with the app for six to eight months).
“We act as a new channel for different types of customers that for whatever reason may not have realized that this restaurant or coffee shop is even there,” he said.
Founded in 2014, Ritual has secured a $3 million seed round and an undisclosed Series A with enough capital to support the expansion to several other cities, Sookman said. Their Toronto headquarters play host to about 50 employees, and Sookman said about four additional employees work remotely from Chicago. As the Chicago market continues to expand, he said they immediately plan on adding as many as four more.
Photos via Ritual.
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