Convenience drives Columbia’s new restaurant delivery service

by Sarah Kohnle

October 20,2007

Making restaurant meals accessible and convenient is the idea behind Tiger's Takeout. And the concept is taking off. The Columbia delivery service started in April and has experienced steady growth, said owner Brian Whorley.

Customers can order by telephone or online, where they're able to review menus, click on what they want to order, provide special instructions, and arrange payment. Then all customers need to do is wait for the delivery driver to pull up to their home or business. Meals can also be preordered to arrive later. There's a $15 minimum order and a $4.95 charge for orders up to $35.

The business started with six restaurants and is in the process of increasing to 35. The additional partnerships mean more variety for customers.

"You can order a real nice K.C. strip, as well as a burger and ice cream," said Matthew Friedman, general manager of Tiger's Takeout.

Whorley and Friedman explained that Tiger's Takeout receives a percentage of its food sales. For the restaurants, it's like having an additional table on a busy night, but one that doesn't require server time or cleanup. For the customers, if ambience isn't calling them, they can avoid a line at the restaurant and enjoy a meal at home, and not just the standard pizza delivery.

From April to August, the delivery service handled orders with four to five employees on staff. When classes resumed in August, orders shot up and the staff jumped to eight people. Now there are 25 on staff, including drivers and dispatchers. On a weekend night, the business will have 60 to 70 orders. During September, it had 1,000 orders.

Whorley said the original idea was to bring families together for dinner. What Tiger's Takeout is finding is that college students, many with their parent's credit cards, make up 30-40 percent of its business. The rest of the company's demographics are hard to pinpoint.

"What is the demographic for people who value convenience over money?" Whorley asked. Deliveries go to all socio-economic levels and all ages, including elderly or homebound, and businesses for lunch and meetings.

"It's difficult to say who we're targeting," Friedman said.

Whorley said it has been exciting taking the business from an idea into a 25-person operation. A 2003 Mizzou graduate, he worked various places after receiving his engineering degree but said he wanted to control his destiny.

He saw an unmet demand in the marketplace. He said he fell in love with Columbia and wanted something iconic for the business name and logo. A friend in St. Louis, Zach Fisher, designed the logo with two tiger eyes forming the Ts in Tiger's Takeout.

Whorley said Tiger's Takeout hires mostly students. In fact, Friedman, the general manager, is a student majoring in hospitality management. The two bounce a lot of ideas off of each other.

Brainstorming is constant because Tiger's Takeout is "doing it from scratch" Friedman said. "I'll shoot a text over to Matt and ask ‘what about this?' " Whorley said. "There's no organizational inertia to overcome in order to change."

Some newer ideas for Tiger's Takeout include a profile on MySpace. It also may add deliveries of beer and wine, as well as movies.

On a greater scale, Tiger's Takeout hopes to expand beyond Columbia. Whorley said the business purchased domain names to extend the service into other universities in the Big 12 Conference.

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