CASE STUDY
Smart Lunches delivers with Metrobi
Smart Lunches is a multi-regional provider delivering hot, ready to eat food to daycares from Boston to DC. They’re feeding thousands of kids every day with fresh, healthy, tasty food, providing them with breakfast, lunch and snacks.
Problem
Solution
March of 2020, I think like everybody else in the country, we had a rather rude surprise. All of our customers shut down in the course of about five days and we found ourselves with no revenue.
Metrobi has been a game changer for catering industry.
With Metrobi, you can save 23% on delivery costs, save 80% of the time from managing deliveries, and delight your customers with delivery notifications & tracking.
What does Smart Lunches do?
Save 80% of the time from managing deliveries and drivers.
Metrobi provides a dedicated operations manager that coordinates drivers on your behalf and solves urgent issues.
A Reliable Solution to a Challenging Issue
David: “March of 2020, I think like everybody else in the country, we had a rather rude surprise. All of our customers shut down in the course of about five days and we found ourselves with no revenue.”
Smart Lunches successfully returned to their pre-shutdown volume by December 2020-January of 2021. And their growth would just continue to accelerate. But on their end, there was a challenge.
With the volume they were now serving, it was getting increasingly hard to distribute. There was also time pressure. Due to the nature of the business, taking several hours to deliver each day was simply not an option – you had to be very precise, both to make it by lunch time, and for the food to be still at the correct temperature and conditions.
"We tried other solutions a little bit, but frankly, we never found anything that really worked for us."
David: “We tried other solutions a little bit, but frankly, we never found anything that really worked for us. A lot of the people, or third party delivery services didn’t understand the time sensitivity.
The food delivery market’s gotten a lot harder in the past two years. Food delivery went through the roof, economics were tough, labor was scarce.
We were put in contact a year and a half ago with Metrobi, and really that conversation started at exactly the right time for us because we were running into this labor crunch combined with our massive growth surge. It really got to the point, around summer of 2021, where we just couldn’t get out.”
"Metrobi allowed us to focus on the food and know that delivery was being taken care of. It was just invaluable for us to be able to just hand off that process.”
We were doubling the company in size in a month. The kitchen staff had to figure out the food, and had to figure out the logistics. We just could not handle drivers, we couldn’t do it. We didn’t have the capacity and frankly, the market wasn’t supporting it.
And so being able to lean on Metrobi particularly in the Boston market to deliver all this food to all these places, it was invaluable for us to be able to just hand that process off. It allowed us to focus on the food and know that delivery was being taken care of.”
"Being able to lean on Metrobi was invaluable."
Practical
Dashboard
The dashboard where we're able to schedule two, three, four days from now, setting the driver requirements and where they'll be going was very practical.
Strong
Communication
The strong communication, the constant feedback, and back and forth interaction, including in real time is very important for us.
Flawless
Delivery
The execution of Metrobi just worked. We've got a couple of critical points where our entire value proposition hinges on, and delivery is probably the most critical element.
