Foodler

» see foodler.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Foodler started in Boston in 2004, which made it older than most of the companies that eventually outran it. Christian Dumontet and John Jannotti built it as a plain ordering site: you picked a restaurant and the site already knew your address and your usual tip. The code was Java and Scala, with an Objective-C app bolted on years later. None of that was the pitch. The pitch was that it remembered you.

By May 2017 more than half a billion dollars of food had gone through it. Around twelve thousand restaurants were listed across forty-eight states, and about twelve hundred of those sat inside greater Boston, which is where the whole thing actually lived. The other cities on the list, Chicago and Denver among a dozen more, were real but thin. Foodler was a local company that had been told to behave like a national one.

This is American takeout infrastructure and I have never ordered a meal in Massachusetts. What travels is the shape rather than the food: a company that solved one city properly, then spent a decade being measured against rivals that had solved none of them and raised more money doing it. Turkey ran the same experiment with Yemeksepeti, which started in Istanbul three years before Foodler and is still taking orders today.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

The feature nobody credits in retrospect was the ranking. Foodler let you rate individual dishes rather than whole restaurants, and it pushed your own order history back at you as recommendations. For a 2004 product that was ahead of the room. It also ran a points scheme called FoodlerBucks that paid out in cash or merchandise, plus a Foodler@work tier for offices ordering thirty lunches at once. Daily runs into the Prudential Center were a real line of business.

Delivery itself was frequently somebody else's problem. Foodler routed orders through DASHED, another Boston outfit founded by Phil Dumontet, which ran bikes and scooters alongside a small fleet of rented Smart cars. In February 2014 it wired in LevelUp so that payments and loyalty worked across the whole restaurant network.

~ the bitcoin year ~

In April 2013 Foodler started accepting Bitcoin, the first food ordering service to take it. You could not buy dinner directly with it. You bought a Foodler gift certificate with Bitcoin and spent that, which was a workaround dressed as a feature, and it earned the company more press than any amount of restaurant onboarding ever did.

The same month brought the iPhone app with GPS lookup, then an iPad app in February 2014 and Android a few days behind it. Christian Dumontet was an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in 2014 and again in 2016, and the Boston Business Journal ranked Foodler sixteenth among the fastest-growing private companies in Massachusetts.

~ the buyout ~

GrubHub spent 2017 buying its way to scale ahead of the delivery wars, and Foodler agreed to be acquired in June. The shutdown came four months later. On 17 October 2017 the website stopped and every order moved across to GrubHub, which is the same day DASHED stopped selling through it.

foodler.com answers a 404 today from a parking CDN, not even a redirect to the buyer. Thirteen years and half a billion dollars of dinners, and the domain was not worth pointing anywhere.

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