Successful startups Los Angeles

Online food delivery has become big business.

Another way that Munchery stands out in this crowded market is with a hybrid approach to producing some of the food that it sells and delivers.

First, it offers meals created by select local chefs, who cook those entrees during their kitchens’ otherwise un-utilized hours.

But Munchery also employs a full-time staff of culinary professionals, including eight chefs and 20 staff assistants. Their latest culinary addition is Scott Newman, former executive chef of Rubicon in San Francisco.

A typical restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area will serve between 150 to 250 people per dinner. Munchery makes 1, 500 deliveries, including about 5, 000 different items per dinner.

“We can’t just call on a chef who is busy serving their patrons at lunch to make more orders of the grilled chicken, or the miso salmon dish, or whatever is selling well that day, ” the CEO said.

Munchery customers range from professional athletes, celebrities and executives, to senior citizens on a fixed income, single workers and families, he said. The service is also used by patrons who cannot easily go out to restaurants and groceries due to health limitations.

One example of the company’s proprietary technology is its order- and change-management system that allows customers to tweak a detail about their order without calling the kitchen.

“You may be running late and decide you want your food delivered to a friend’s house, not your house. So on our system, you can change the delivery time and address. It’s the kind of flexibility that you wish you’d get from FedEx, Amazon or UPS, ” Mr. Chu said.

Munchery entrees–priced between $9 and $13 each–are delivered partly cooked, and customers are expected to heat them up the last bit at home. This stops food from arriving in a soggy, over-cooked state. The company charges about $4 per delivery no matter how many meals are included in an order.

Following the one-for-one model made popular by Warby Parker and TOMS Shoes, Munchery donates one meal to the San Francisco and Marin Food Bank for every meal ordered on its site.

Shervin Pishevar of Sherpa Ventures says, “At this point, Munchery is the largest restaurant in the world if you go by the number of orders it’s doing in San Francisco alone from one kitchen.”

Mr. Pishevar also called Munchery a “kitchen in the cloud, ” that will likely be “bigger than Chipotle, an $18 billion business.”

The company and its investors expect Munchery to use the $28 million Series B funding to bring its food delivery service to Seattle, other large markets in the U.S. and beyond.

Earlier, Munchery raised $210, 000 in seed funding and $4 million in Series A funding, bringing its total capital raised to $32.21 million.