Restaurants Reclaim Customer Relationships
Hadi Rashid, co-founder of Lunchbox, on vertical SaaS for restaurants
This was the core opening for restaurant vertical SaaS, because the marketplaces trained customers to order online while taking the customer relationship away from the restaurant. Lunchbox started from the view that commission was not the only cost. The bigger loss was that DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub owned the order history, repeat purchase signals, and marketing channel, while the restaurant became a supplier inside someone else’s app.
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Marketplace fees were painful in pure margin terms. During COVID, DoorDash’s take rate reached about 30%, and newly delivery reliant restaurants saw margins fall to 1 to 2%. That made direct ordering software attractive even before it proved it could fully replace marketplace demand.
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Lunchbox, ChowNow, and later Owner sold a different model, a restaurant runs its own site, app, loyalty, email, and SMS, then uses marketplaces more as a paid acquisition channel. Across this owned stack, blended costs were closer to about 10 to 11%, with the tradeoff that the restaurant keeps the customer record.
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The product implication is that online ordering is really a data capture wedge. A restaurant does not just want the ticket. It wants to know who ordered, what they buy, how often they come back, and what message gets them to reorder. That is why Lunchbox is built around ordering, loyalty, and customer marketing together.
The market is moving toward a split model where marketplaces remain important for discovery and logistics, but the most valuable restaurant software owns the repeat customer loop. That pushes Lunchbox and its peers further toward being CRM and growth systems for restaurants, not just checkout tools, and it pushes marketplaces to offer more SaaS features to defend their position.