For students looking to shake up their usual culinary routine of instant noodles and Easy Mac, but don’t want to lift more than a finger, downloading Waitr to their smartphones allows food to appear at their door.
Waitr was created by Chris Meaux in 2014 to help renovate the local dining experience of Lake Charles, but has since expanded into other areas of Louisiana and Texas.
“Our main office is in Lake Charles, but we have offices in Lafayette and Houston, now we’re opening an office in Baton Rouge as well,” Meaux said.
Originally designed to be a delivery service for one restaurant, Meaux’s creation has taken on a entirely new form, which caters to the tech startup age of today.
“It started in 2009, when I was living in South Lake Texas,” he said. “My wife and I always tried to answer the question ‘what’s for dinner,’ so I started a little to-go company start called Meaux’s to go, which [allowed you to order] on the internet. It was just a little test concept, so we would cook the food and deliver it.”
Meaux and his partners decided rather than cooking the food, they would roll it out with restaurant partners to tailor a faster way to receive quality meals. In 2013, Waitr’s team won a startup weekend competition, and after two years of development, Waitr was launched into the world of food delivery in January of 2015.
In action, Waitr took a while to develop but, is fully formed and ready to serve multiple communities with a simple business plan. By using a specialized smartphone app to gain consumers, work with restaurants and drivers simultaneously, Meaux said he is able to have full creative control of his corporation.
Waitr’s strategy primarily focuses on independent and locally owned restaurants using an in-house software to process app orders and streamline the connection between driver and customer.
“We built all of the software we use,” Meaux said. “We actually have an app that consumers use that we built, and it’s linked to a restaurant platform that we built for restaurants, which is how they receive the orders.”
He said when a customer places an order on the Waitr app, the restaurant receives the order on an iPad and the business accepts the order. Once the order is accepted, the drivers are notified an order is near them. The meal is placed and delivered.
Waitr driver Ashley Ayala said she gets the one-on-one experience between meeting with the restaurants and the consumers.
“Not only do I get to meet a bunch of cool people, I get to make people happy by bringing them food, especially on days they can’t leave from work,” she said. “It makes me smile when I can contribute to them when they’re busy.”
Ayala said the restaurants are also happy to see the business Waitr brings.
She said the service is particularly benefical to busy students and employees. The delivery fee is $4.99 for as much, or as litte, as the customer wants brought to them.
Waitr also includes group ordering features. The app offers the convenience of allowing anyone in the same building as someone else to join the group and order from the same restaurant.
“The person who creates the group has a pin number, and they pay the delivery fee,” Ayala said. “Anyone who wants to join the group order types in that pin number, everyone pays separately so nobody owes anyone else.”