Locale - Local food delivered in one box
A marketplace that delivers the best local food from up to hours away, all in one box
I discover a new startup every week and share it with you. This week’s featured startup is Locale. Subscribe to get each and every issue.
What it does: Locale is a marketplace that aggregates high quality, local businesses together. Locale customers can order food from multiple businesses (some up to 200 miles away), pay in-store prices, and get it all delivered in one box with a $5 delivery fee.
How it started: Christopher Clark, Jonathan Friedland and Kaveh Nemati started Locale after realizing that even though food delivery is a really crowded space, small ticket items (< $10) don't fit the instantaneous delivery model as the majority of your bill will come from delivery fees. So they came up with a unique order-ahead business model that is able to expand the delivery radius of
businesses to reach new customers without any upfront costs or time commitments.
How it works: After placing your online order, Locale will pick up the order from the different vendors and delivers it once a week, on Saturday morning.
Traction: Since launching a year ago, Locale is available in the Bay Area and doing over $200K in monthly revenue and has delivered more than 15K orders. Consumers retain 70%+ month over month with more than $105 average order value. Locale is backed by YC, Tencent co-founder Jason Zeng’s Decent Capital, and more.
Why it’s interesting: By constraining their delivery window to once a week, Locale is able to bypass several factors that makes on-demand delivery typically expensive (up to 30% for delivery and 14% for pickup orders) or simply not reachable (on-demand delivery typically only delivers from vendors within a 2 mile radius). Of course what helps is that they’re not competing with the typical time-sensitive warm meals that constitutes the majority of food delivery orders. Overall, Locale has found a lucrative niche that has been previously underserved.
