With the most recent closure of restaurant dining rooms, it’s the return of take-out and the reign of the Uber Eats of this world for delivery. Reign? No ! Because an application here is still resisting the invader: RestoLoco.
• Read also: Quebec restaurateurs become owners of RestoLoco
The 37-year-old founder of the Quebec service cannot get over seeing American multinationals like Uber get richer on the backs of our restaurateurs.
“In North America, delivery is a rapidly growing $ 100 billion market. We are in the process of letting these giants and their international investors take all the space, ”says Axel Lespérance regarding Uber Eats, DoorDash and SkipTheDishes.
The ex-marketing pro wants to make the restaurant owners here benefit from the windfall. This is why he launched RestoLoco in August 2020 and has dedicated himself to it ever since.
The application resembles those of its competitors and currently has around 150 restaurants.
For several months now, RestoLoco has offered Quebec restaurateurs the opportunity to become shareholders of the company through the crowdfunding platform Frontfundr. “It would have been much easier to go see investors and do our ‘pitch’ 10 times,” he pleads.
Except that RestoLoco is “a collective project that wants to rally the local restaurant industry”.
Axel Lespérance’s goal is to raise $ 250,000. Since the end of November, he has fetched nearly $ 80,000.
Responsive customer service
RestoLoco might look like Uber Eats or DoorDash, but it doesn’t work the same way.
Restaurant owners pay less for their deliveries. “We make more money than with Uber Eats,” confirms Guillaume Maillé, co-owner of Les Garnements Pizza & Milkshake.
This restaurant, born in Montreal in December 2020, has been using RestoLoco since day one, and the platform accounts for 35% to 40% of its orders.
Ultimately, once the dining rooms reopen, the goal of Les Garnements Pizza & Milkshake is to do business only with RestoLoco. “We can’t afford to cut the other platforms for the moment, but things are going so well that that is the goal,” said Guillaume Maillé.
Above all, it’s her responsive customer service that sets her apart, whether it’s for a menu change, refunds or the addition of new promotions.
“It’s fun to have a company that you can reach at all times and not send 12 emails to a company in the United States that never responds,” says the co-owner of the restaurant.
Guillaume Maillé and his partner are currently in talks with RestoLoco to invest in the company “significantly”.
The stake of the client list
For Kamran Raja, co-owner of the restaurant Pita Bar, in Montreal, RestoLoco above all allows people to discover new restaurants.
“We have a lot of take out orders that go through their application,” says the 48-year-old chef.
Because RestoLoco can also take charge of a restaurant’s website and thus manage all its orders.
“The biggest restaurant in Quebec today is Uber Eats. They are the ones who have the most customers and carry out the most transactions, ”recalls Axel Lespérance.
The biggest issue, according to him, is not the delivery costs, but the relationship with the customer. “What’s worth the money is the data, it’s the customer list. And that’s what we want to give back to local restaurateurs, ”he says.
