Wednesday, April 16, 2008

GrubHub Brings Meal Delivery to Your Keyboard

About a week ago, Kelly and I were trying to figure out what to do about dinner. It was a week night and we both had really long stressful days at work and just weren't in the mood to fix anything. The weather outside was the usually winter/spring mix in Chicagoland. You know the kind not cold enough to snow but not warm enough for the rain to stay all the way liquid. We found ourselves trying to decide what was worse. Mustering up the energy to cook dinner or braving the nasty weather so someone else would cook for us. We decided on a compromise of having some poor delivery person brave the weather for us. During our decision making process I remembered advertisements I had seen on the 'L' for a new website called GrubHub. So instead of trying to remember what places delivered I jumped on the computer and pulled up the site.

We were blown away from the get go. The site allows you to bring up a list of every restaurant that will deliver to your address, but it doesn't stop there! Once you type in your address you can sort by cuisine, delivery hours, distance from your address, or whether they have coupons available. The main page incorporates an interactive map that shows you the restaurants on your list and their relation to you. Once you have selected a restaurant, you can pull up an 'e' version of their menu and place your order online by selecting the items and amount of each that you want.

Did I mention that they make every attempt to be 'eco' friendly too? That's right, they allow you to select options that instruct the restaurant to not send napkin, plastic ware and other items that you don't need so they are not wasted and end up in a landfill, but they also purchase "carbon credits" with every order that is made in an attempt to offset the emissions that released into the atmosphere from the delivery vehicles at the participating restaurants. Carbon Credits are used toward green related activities like planting trees. The feature for excluding utensils needs some work because we selected it and the restaurant still sent those items along with our food, but that may have been user error on their part.

You can also, create your own account which gives you cool features like your own "menu drawer" where you can keep virtual copies of the menus you order from regularly. Furthermore, you can leave and read reviews on restaurants, which come in handy if its a place you have never used before.

It was a great experience and cool resource that I would recommend for anyone. The only drawback right now is that they only appear to operate in three metro areas at this time. Those areas are Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston, but if others have the same reaction we had to the site then its only a matter of time before it expands to other areas soon!

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posted by Heath @ 12:17 PM 2 Comments