Indianapolis-based delivery-only restaurant ClusterTruck Inc. has spun off its software platform into a separate business called Empower Delivery, the companies announced Wednesday.
Empower was formed in July and has until now operated in stealth mode.
In connection with the spinoff, Indianapolis-based Empower raised $3 million in seed funding in July, led by Indianapolis-based venture firm Allos Ventures and some of the first investors in High Alpha Capital and ClusterTruck. Completed a procurement round.
ClusterTruck co-founders Chris Baggott and Dan McFadden are also co-founders of Empower. McFadden, who was CTO at ClusterTruck, will move to Empower and fill the same role. Empower’s chief product officer is Brian Howenstein, formerly the chief operating officer of ClusterTruck.
The CEO of Empower is Meredith Sandland, a restaurateur who lives in the greater Los Angeles area.
Empower has a total of seven employees, four of whom live in the Indianapolis area and three of whom are remote workers who live elsewhere.
Launched in 2015, ClusterTruck utilizes software and technology that allows customers to order online from a variety of menu options and have it delivered within 30 minutes. The company’s goal is for him to deliver the order within 7-8 minutes of the food being prepared.
Empower offers a rebuilt version of the ClusterTruck platform. This can be used by customers to power their own shipping operations.
Empower targets independent restaurant groups that have not yet committed to delivery on a large scale. According to Baggott, the ideal customer for Empower is that in a given market he has between 5 and 50 locations and the ability to handle at least 100 delivery orders per day.
These deliveries are handled from what the industry calls ghost kitchens. This is a site that exists solely to prepare delivery orders and does not offer eat-in services. Some restaurant operators operate both eat-ins and ghost kitchens. Some, like ClusterTruck, only use ghost kitchens.
“Ghost kitchens are a really big trend everywhere,” Sandland says.
Sandland previously served as Chief Operating Officer at Kitchen United, a company that develops commercial kitchens and helps develop restaurant delivery businesses. Prior to that, he was an executive at Yum!, based in Louisville, Kentucky. At Brands, from 2013 until 2017 he served as Chief Development Officer for Taco Bell. Sandland is also co-author with Carl Orsbourn on his 2021 book on transforming the restaurant industry, Delivering the Digital Restaurant: Your Roadmap to the Future of Food.
Demand for restaurant deliveries has skyrocketed since the pandemic began, but Bagot says many restaurants are frustrated with existing options for managing deliveries. This is the business problem he’s trying to solve for Empower.
Third-party services such as DoorDash and Uber Eats do not allow restaurants to control their own delivery systems, and restaurants that process deliveries in-house require 15 to 15 people to handle food orders, driver management, and customer management. You may need 20 different software. Other aspects of operating loyalty programs and shipping services.
“Everyone really hates the third-party aspect of this,” says Baggott. “They want to solve this problem.”
Empower operates as a software-as-a-service company. In other words, they generate revenue from the fees their customers pay to access their software platform.
ClusterTruck is Empower’s first paying customer, and Sandland said he expects other customers to start using Empower’s platform next year. She declined to identify those customers.
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