Stomach Growling? Call Fetch Food. Fetch Food, a Salt Lake City based start-up, offers restaurant food delivery on the cheap. One user on their website commented, “if you haven’t used Fetch Food, you’re doing lunch wrong.” This innovative start up, founded by two students at the University of Utah, utilizes a patented routing algorithm to make deliveries efficient and inexpensive. They found success thanks to a $5,000 grant in last year’s Opportunity Quest (OQ) competition.
Karthik Raman and Amrish Kapoor started Fetch Food and their business is expanding. They have discovered a high demand for food delivery from delicious neighborhood restaurants. Karthik commented, “since winning OQ, we have added several new restaurants included in our services and we’ve also revamped the website, so checkout is a lot more fluid.” Karthik said that their customer base has grown by 70% since last year.
As of today, Fetch Food has processed $330,000 in orders from over 3000 customers in Salt Lake City. Karthik said, “our business is running itself via a local manager that we have hired. We were offered a few buy out deals, but decided to continue our own operations.”
Opportunity Quest is a statewide, business-plan summary competition hosted by the Utah Entrepreneur Series, a division of the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute and the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. The competition is sponsored by Zions Bank and focuses on the executive summary stage of business development. Fetch Food was named winner of the 2014 OQ competition.
Opportunity Quest has helped make Karthik and Amrish’s business idea a reality. When asked if Karthik had any tips for the applicants this year, he said, “in the past few years we’ve learned how amazing a place the U of U (and Salt Lake City) is for entrepreneurship. In particular with the OQ, applicants should focus on the numbers. For example, how will you get revenue? How is this revenue divided into profit and operations? And how quickly can you grow with/without OQ funding.”
All student entrepreneurs are encouraged to apply. Dates for the this years Opportunity Quest can be found here: https://lassonde.utah.edu/oq/. Students participate by registering for the branch competition at their universities through the posted link.
