Early in the pandemic GiftAMeal was hit as hard as the restaurants it serves, but CEO Andrew Glantz tells the 4thEst8 his for-profit social venture has seen revenues return – and has given away more than a half million meals to the needy.
Andrew Glantz, GiftAMeal CEO
“So we’ve built this out to 215 partner restaurants… (and) we just hit 40,000 app users… and we provided over 580,000 meals to those in need so far,” Glants said. “We’ve been able to see a lot of growth, despite the pandemic, actually, last month was our highest revenue month to date.”
GiftAMeal is a free mobile app. Users take a photo of their order from one of GiftAMeal’s partner restaurants, using the app. For every photo, GiftAMeal makes a donation to a local food bank to cover a meal. GiftAMeal partners pay a monthly subscription, partly for marketing and partly just to give back.
When the pandemic first hit Glantz contacted all his customers and waived subscription fees for a few months to any restaurant that needed it. Then the GiftAMeal team threw themselves into supporting restaurants any way they could, by promoting their clients that were still open, and their drive-up service or delivery. They also encouraged app users to buy gift cards, and Glantz started a podcast called ‘Food on the Table’ to promote member restaurants whether they were open or not.
Glantz started GiftAMeal in 2015. The company is headquartered in Coretex in St. Louis, has three full time employees, and has raised $265,000 in angel investments – some from Capital Innovators and an Arch Grant. The company is up and running in St. Louis, and has a handful of restaurants in Chicago – but is targeting other markets and chains for expansion in 2021.
“Now that we’ve seen this proof of concept in the St. Louis market, (we are) seeing how can we expand this to other markets,” Glantz said. “Can we be working with larger clients like chain restaurants at the corporate level and large franchisees?”
