Meal delivery services can save time and often money, but imagine having a Michelin-starred meal delivered to your door.
Enter meal delivery start Entrance. Jon Bell and Jason Weingarten launched in Chicago last July with a Michelin-trained culinary team — led by Alex Carnovale of The French Laundry — preparing restaurant-like quality meals packed in packaging is neutral and recyclable so that food doesn’t get soggy on arrival or cold. Most items are ready to eat in minutes.
Bell and Weingarten are not your typical food delivery startup founders. Both have software backgrounds, with Bell previously working at Netflix as a global product lead while Weingarten is building education-related software.
Sample menu of Entrée Image credits: Entrance
They created Entrée’s menu to feature 30 to 50 items in any given month including global dishes by category breakfast, meals for two, desserts, and a drink program that includes craft cocktails labour. Entrée’s app is now available on the App Store.
It adds about two new offerings per week and costs about 30% to 50% less than comparable restaurant offerings. The company also includes a number of surroundings, including curated playlists, a virtual curator, and coloring pages for kids.
Eight months after the company launched, the concept is getting attention, Bell told TechCrunch. Entrée has more than 1,000 users and brings in tens of thousands of revenue every month. Additionally, the average order volume is over $60 and the reorder rate is over 40% within 30 days, Weingarten said in an interview.
“Average order volume is steady north of $60, which is quite high compared to what we have seen for other delivery services,” Weingarten said. “We were really excited to see people not necessarily ordering the same thing, but ordering something different each time and meticulously posting ratings and feedback. We have many patrons who have ordered from us more than 20 times.”
Entree is active Ready-to-eat food market in the US is valued at $156.3 billion by 2022. And there are plenty of players backed by the venture. Example: Daily Harvest, Instagram, positive food, gorgeous spoon, Prado, DishesDivvy And shelf have all raised funds over the past few years for their meal delivery methods for everything from plant-based meals to homemade meals.
Now, Entrée itself is announcing a $2.5 million pre-seed funding led by M25 with participation from investors, including Hustle Fund, Pillar VC and The Community Fund.
Bell, who has identified the next locations, said the new funding, closed last month, will help the 14-employee company expand outside of Chicago, starting in 2024. It will also move into technology development as Entrée works to add an Android app and new features such as “coming soon” and referral programs.
In addition, the company is improving the speed and speed of launching new items to meet the needs of users, who often ask what new dishes will be offered in the coming weeks.
“We felt it was important to build a different experience,” says Bell. “We own the entire stack and continue to grow there. We are continuing to invest in world-class culinary experts and speed up menu development and experiment with different finishing methods, including new distribution channels and approaches that We are experimenting.”
