“This funding means a lot .. as a company in the restaurant industry we not only made it through the pandemic we grew,” CEO Andrew Glanz told the 4thEst8. “Now we’re ready to scale it up and make an impact with restaurants across the country.”
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.
Strategy: How will you scale?
Andrew Glanz, GiftAMeal CEO
“We just posted the role of Chief Growth Officer on our website,” Glanz said. “We’re bringing in someone to get those relationships with chain restaurants and other companies in the food industry… like distributors and associations.”
$100,000 of today’s money came from a follow-on (and non-dilutive) investment from Arch Grants. The other $400,000 came from angel investors; half from the St. Louis area and the other half from other parts of the country.
This spring Glanz claimed GiftAMeal had 215 restaurant partners and 40,000 app users, providing more than 655,000 meals to those in need. According to CrunchBase, since the company was founded in 2014 it has secured three seed rounds totaling $265,000 from Capital Innovators and Sandy Khaund.
Links:
On the 4thEst8:
GiftAMeal cuts first deal with a chain; gets toe-hold in third market
