GiftAMeal is celebrating the one year anniversary of landing it’s first chain restaurant client, Lions Choice. Restaurant chains are key to the startups expansion plans as they get the social marketing platform in to new cities.
“We’ve proven out that we can work with independent restaurants,” GiftAMeal CEO Andrew Glantz told the 4thEst8. “When we can expand with chains as well, then we can build up around each of these chain locations across the country with independent restaurants.”
GiftAMeal is a for-profit marketing company with a socially conscious mission. Through it’s free mobile app users take a photo of their order at a GiftAMeal partner restaurant. For every post to social media, GiftAMeal makes a donation to a local food bank to cover a meal for someone in need. GiftAMeal partners pay a monthly subscription, partly for the marketing aspect of the service and partly to support the food bank effort. Markets include St. Louis, Chicago, Kansas City as well as parts of North Carolina and New Hampshire. Chain partners include Lion’s Choice and Andy’s Frozen Custard.
Glanz claims GiftAMeal has 290 restaurant partners and 45,000 app users, providing more than 800,000 meals to those in need. GiftAMeal picked up $100,000 in a non-dilutive follow-on investment from Arch Grants, concurrent with a $400,000 angel round this spring. Since the company got its start in 2014 it has had four seed rounds with the total raised (counting grants) topping $769,000 according to CrunchBase, where investors are identified as Capital Innovators, Skandalaris Center, Arch Grants and private investors.
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