Days after bringing on it’s biggest franchise group, and just a few weeks after partnering with it’s fourth full restaurant chain, the for-profit (with a social mission) startup GiftAMeal crosses the 1 million meal mark.
Andrew Glantz, GiftAMeal CEO
“It’s a huge milestone for us… at the beginning of the pandemic we were under 250,000 meals and it was a time period when restaurants were shutting down and we didn’t know what the future of the company would look like,” CEO Andrew Glantz told bizblip. “Seeing 1 million meals, we are very grateful, and look forward to continued growth.”
Through its free mobile app users take a photo of their order at more than 500 GiftAMeal partner restaurants. 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, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.
To celebrate, Glantz tells bizblip he’s throwing an open party at The Food Hall at City Foundry STL on Saturday, July 23 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. No registration necessary.
Glantz claims GiftAMeal has 50,000 app users. 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.
