Writing Sample: Soft Sell Editorial

Ordering Food Online Should Be Easy
George Freitag 05.21.08

Remember when everyone talked about how the internet was going to make it so you never had to leave your house? How we were going to lose all communication skills as a result of people having little or no contact with one another? Well, that sort of came about. Record stores everywhere are struggling from places like iTunes and Napster, Amazon has become a virtual Walmart, even a place like Zappos.com has been able to establish itself as the definitive source for shoes. Surprisingly, though, there has been one glaring exception to this online movement; restaurants. Despite all the advances with online ordering in areas such as clothes, music and movies, the internet is generally used as little more than a phone book for take out and delivery. Foodpatio hopes to change all that.

Right now, if you're hungry, you typically go through the lengthy process of figuring out the dish you're in the mood for, finding a place nearby, researching their number and giving them a call. Foodpatio's philosophy is pretty simple: people should be able to go to one place for take out and delivery. If you're in the mood for a CD, for example, you don't look up the record label and find the album through the Capitol Records website; you go to iTunes. Foodpatio's mission is no different. If you want some food delivered, you just go to Foodpatio.com.

Foodpatio was founded by Justin McAuley, Eric Loes, Rick Murphy and Adam Doyle with the basic idea of created an intuitive platform for ordering food. Eventually the idea grew to include plans to create the first, one-stop online delivery restaurant for all places in your area. Right now, Foodpatio serves a handful of restaurants in the Kansas City area, such as Wheat State Pizza and Pita Pit but with their new beta release, they are hoping to expand. Soon, restaurants will be able to sign up online and enter their menu and payment information for immediate connection to the world of online food delivery. Of course, this will list them alongside with all of the other restaurants in delivery range but, for an additional fee, Foodpatio will create a special site for a restaurant and even put it on the restaurant's server.

From a customer's perspective, Foodpatio hopes to not only simplify the surprisingly tedious ordering process for deliveries, but also pander to the most indecisive of parties by allowing customers to order from several different restaurants at the same time. You see, the engine allows customers to add up several orders from different places on the same ticket, letting the software figure out where to send everything. Of course, you'll still have to tip three different delivery drivers but as long as it avoids the General Tsao's chicken vs. pepperoni pizza debate, it may be worth it.

Despite all of these ambitious goals, however, perhaps the best thing that Foodpatio can do for the industry is simply raise the standard for online ordering. These days, every restaurant site is different, making substitutions is next to impossible and often you have no idea what you ordered until you enter your payment information. The concept of making a one-stop food delivery site is promising, but for now I'm willing to settle for a site that I can figure out. If more restaurants start turning to Foodpatio to create their ordering interface, maybe this will, at least, motivate others to come up with one that's somewhat comparable. After all, we are supposed to be the generation with diminished social skills. Why force us into conversations on our tiny, uncomfortable cell phones when so many of us would rather just punch our orders into a faceless database? Hopefully, Foodpatio will be able to make this dream a reality.

-George Freitag

George R. Freitag | george@professionalgeorge.org