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How Ordermark Is Taming The Chaos Of Online Restaurant Orders, With Alex Canter

If you run a restaurant, it turns out the move towards online ordering is a recipe for chaos--with multiple online order services and apps, all with their own way of getting orders to your restaurant. Santa Monica-based Ordermark (www.getordermark.com) is looking to tame that chaos with a system which takes all of those online orders, and feeds them into a single printer at a restaurant. We chatted with CEO and founder of Ordermark, Alex Canter, who tells us the story of how Ordermark actually grew out of LA's famed Canter's Deli, and the chaos of trying to handle online ordering at the landmark LA restaurant. Ordermark is venture backed by TenOneTen Ventures, Act One Ventures, Mucker Capital, and others.

What is Ordermark?

Alex Canter: We streamline all online orders from third party services like Grubhub and Doordash, and bring all of those orders to a single printer, which we give to a restaurant to help them embrace online ordering, and really expand their reach beyond their four walls.

Why is there a need for something like this?

Alex Canter: Right off, foot traffic is down at restaurants, particularly in major cities. The reason for that, is restaurant discovery is changing. People are now using their phones to do everything, and ordering food is now more popular with these apps. The Grubhubs of the world have spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring users, so that when someone is hungry, the first thing they do is open up the Grubhub app to find something to eat. If your restaurant doesn't exist in those services, then there's zero chance that you'll get an order. It's really important for a restaurant to be visible on all of these different apps, and to be able to receive orders from all those hungry people. Lots of restaurants have started to invest in building their own apps, but realistically, it's not moving the needle for them. It's the third party apps that are bringing in the volume, and even if you choose one or two of them, that means you're missing out on 90 percent of the online ordering potential represented by all those platforms. At the end of the day, we make it really easy to take advantage of all of these awesome platforms, so that you can benefit for each one of those services.

Why not just use the software and systems that are provided by all of those different mobile app services, and just sign up for the top two or three?

Alex Canter: The story of my own personal experience at Canter's Deli, is we ended up with 14 ordering services, and ended up with 9 tablets and iPads, two laptops, and a fax machine to handle all of these incoming orders. It was very difficult for the staff to manage, to confirm and handle all these orders. We called that area of the restaurant the “war zone”. The staff was very frustrated with the experience. We came up with this, in order to come up with a way to bring it all together, and make it easier to fulfill those orders.

We didn't realize you were related to THAT Canter's. Tell us a bit more about how you're tied into the restaurant?

Alex Canter: I grew up as a part of the fourth generation in Canter's Deli, which my great grandfather started in 1931. My family has been working there ever since. I grew up in the business, working in al lthese different positions, bringing in new technology. At first, I started out with Grubhub, and slowly, as each of these online services started popping up, we brought more in to get more orders. We realized that online ordering was extremely powerful, and it now makes up over 30 percent of Canter's business today.

When did you decide to create a startup out of this, to provide this to other restaurants?

Alex Canter: I have been working in food technology prior to starting OrderMark. The problem was, the what was most relevant to our own restaurant was this online ordering disruption, but we just weren't set up for this. We started asking our network of restaurant owners how they were handling this. We uncovered that this was not just a major problem for our own restaurant, all of these other restaurants we were talking to—from old-school mom-and-pop operations to chains, were experiencing this same pain point. I figured out the opportunity was a lot larger than just solving this proble m for Canter's. Talking to people, they told me that if someone could just build this solution, they would pay for it. So, we started to do exactly that, and it grew, and has become what we have created today. What we had originally built at Canter's, one-by-one, by bringing in these order systems, turned into our solution. We really started to take the training wheels off, and started rolling this out to other restaurants in Los Angeles and now nationwide, and even recently put this into a couple of Sonic locations.

You've got a great set of local LA investors, how did you connect with them?

Alex Canter: Once we started getting some traction, we started working with our first, mid-sized chains. We kept sharing content, and posting pictures on LinkedIn, which we believe is a very strong and powerful social media too. From there, we actually had someone named Michael Ross reach out to us with interest to invest. At first, we weren't sure if he was serious, but we took a meeting with him, and he introduced us to his network of people who were interested in investing in LA technology companies, which is how we were introduced to TenOneTen Ventures. Eytan and David put out some terms and money and put it all together. They are great, incredible people, and super smart, and most importantly, they are kind and generous people, giving back to the tech community.

Where's the company now, and what's next for you?

Alex Canter: We are now a 30-person company, based in Santa Monica. We're starting to really pinpoint the major cities where there's the most online ordering volume and traction, and helping restaurants to roll this out nationwide. We're helping get restaurants get online ordering starting, with everything from the smallest mom-and-pop restaurants to the largest chains out there.

Thanks, and good luck!