Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Grace.
Alex, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My story is a bit circular, but none the less exciting and full of adventures. I grew up in Chicago and spent most of my life there, then decided to leave the midwest for college – heading to the University of Oregon. After college, I moved back to Chicago and started my career as an ad sales rep for the Chicago Tribune. After that, I decided that legacy media was not for me and moved over to an exciting new technology company called Echo Global logistics. It was here that I was introduced to the people and concepts that would eventually become Fooda. I distinctly remember bragging to my friends about how cool it was that my company had a guest restaurant program that brought cool local Chicago restaurants into our office for lunch daily. Little did I know that I would soon help take that idea and grow it into new cities ten years later.
After Echo, I went to work for a British event management company that saw me opening offices (and living in) Mexico City, Montreal, and finally Calgary. It was during these five years that I learned how to be the CEO of my own business – creating my own teams, processes, culture, etc. I also learned how to adapt business to different cultures, languages, and the invaluable lesson of getting comfortable outside your comfort zone. After my international tour of duty – I came back to Dallas to figure out my next move. Now six years and two companies later – I am learning the irony of the saying “I wasn’t born in Texas, but got here as fast as I could”.
My Texas adventure started with me taking over the inside sales department for a fast-growing event technology company locally. I learned so much about private equity-backed tech companies and the Saas industry. From here I eventually reconnected with my old colleagues from Echo who were now ready to expand Fooda outside Chicago and launch their 5th market – Dallas. After a few weeks of meetings – I took the leap and we launched Dallas in February of 2017! It’s now been almost three years – and the ride has been nuts!
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Challenges? I could write a miniseries based on these alone! Every day presents a thousand challenges in the startup world, so rather than list them out I will give advice that has helped me solve most of them.
1) Focus on only the problems you can solve/are within your control. Triage.
2) Let some fires burn. Fires are good. Help you learn how resilient your business is and where it needs to be more fortified.
3) Listen.
4) Empower your team, don’t babysit.
5) If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
Fooda – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
In 2011, a group of brokers at a major logistics company in Chicago had a lunch problem. Time was money, so they couldn’t afford to venture out to the nearest restaurant for lunch (it was a 30-minute roundtrip!). Instead, they started asking restaurants to come to them- and it worked! Word got out in the building and the restaurant “popups” quickly became popular with the busy office workers. When the employees from nearby companies began sneaking into the office for the new lunch program, Fooda was born.
Everyone soon realized that the Popup Lunch concept is an all-around win: local restaurants get exposure to new customers and sell thousands of extra meals, office workers love the convenience and variety of fresh, local, authentic food, companies in the building are happy because their employees stick around at lunch and buildings have an exciting and differentiating amenity to offer their tenants without the expense of building out a full kitchen.
Since then, Fooda has expanded to 20+ US cities, partnered with 3,000+ restaurants, sold over 30 million meals and popped up in over 4,000 companies and building lobbies. We’ve also expanded our product offerings to include catering, employer-paid meal programs, and full company cafeterias – which were awarded Food Management Magazine’s Best New Concept in 2018. We’ve also invested heavily in the technology side of our business, designing an enterprise-grade POS system from the ground up and using that data to design proprietary machine learning algorithms. The algorithms help optimize schedules for our restaurants based on availability and popularity to maximize potential earnings and tell our restaurants exactly how much food to bring to each event.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Not only has the company as a whole seen exponential growth in just a few short years, but so have the individual markets. In my role overseeing our 6th new market (and the first market in the south) Dallas. I have witnessed us grow from zero to more than $10m in Gross Food Sales in just 24 months. We’ve grown from 1 employee to 13, 0 locations to 115 and 0 restaurants to over 90 across Dallas-Fort Worth. Additionally, the company itself has grown to over 300 employees and over $200m in GFS. Staggering.
Contact Info:
- Address: 1601 Elm Street, Floor 33
Dallas, TX 75201 - Website: www.fooda.com
- Phone: 3129722123
- Email: info@fooda.com
- Instagram: @gofooda
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GoFooda/
- Twitter: @gofooda
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fooda/
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