For four years, college students across the country have been using Snackpass to order food from local restaurants and interact with their friends.
Now, many of those scholars are graduating, and Snackpass wants to go right along with them.
The company’s unique model allows users to share their purchases and gift meal credits to friends with each order. The cross between a food app and a social media platform is perfectly suited to the insular and social world of college campuses. But Snackpass sees a place for itself out in the “real world”—major to mid-sized cities—as well.
“When we started it was college-based, so we wanted to try to get just the college,” said Ben Rubenstein, head of operations, business development and expansion for Snackpass. The company’s goal is to partner with every restaurant within a 1- to 2-mile radius of a campus, with a special emphasis on high-frequency items like coffee, bagels and boba. Now it’s working on expanding into cities where lots of college grads tend to end up, including New York City this summer.
“I think there’s a lot of opportunities to follow the graduates,” he said. “We’re just starting to unlock the post-grad user.”
By all accounts, San Francisco-based Snackpass has been extremely successful in the college environment. Now available on 13 campuses, it has “hundreds of thousands” of users and a retention rate of around 70%.
“It’s people’s favorite social media platform,” Rubenstein said.
That large and engaged user base is a big plus for restaurants.
Taco & Co. opened in Berkeley, Calif., in September, about a block from the University of California’s campus. As the taco joint’s owners got the lay of the land, they started noticing that all the restaurants around them had a blue Snackpass sticker in the window.
“The way they framed it was, ‘You have to get it. That’s what we all are using,’” said co-owner Israel Castro.
Taco & Co. started using Snackpass in October and quickly began gaining momentum through the app. Through April, Snackpass was accounting for about 60% of its sales and between 150 and 170 orders a day, Castro said.
The app’s gifting feature, which allows users to share credits even with people not on the app, has helped generate a steady stream of new customers as well. It also has a built-in loyalty program that rewards customers with a free menu item after a certain number of orders—in Taco & Co.'s case, customers can cash in 12 credits for its signature Berkeley Birria Taco.
Taco & Co. also uses DoorDash, Postmates and Uber Eats. But Snackpass “is our absolute favorite,” Castro said. During busy periods, the restaurant might turn the other providers off, but Snackpass is always on.
About 80% of Taco & Co.’s Snackpass orders are for pickup, which is Snackpass’ main area of focus. The company takes a 10% cut of each order, regardless of whether it’s for pickup or delivery.
Image courtesy of Snackpass
Like its larger third-party ordering counterparts, Snackpass has begun to look more like an all-around restaurant tech platform since the pandemic began. It now offers custom websites, QR codes and kiosks for on-site ordering, as well as a suite of marketing tools. Snackpass can use those various data streams to fuel marketing campaigns for restaurants aimed at attracting new customers or getting existing ones to order more.
“If we really want to support these restaurants and act more as [a] marketing partner … being able to funnel all order channels through Snackpass is the biggest way we can support,” Rubenstein said.
The Snackpass kiosk has had a more practical impact at Taco & Co, too. It recently installed one outside to ease the order-taking burden for its workers, many of whom don’t speak English, Castro said. Walk-in customers just enter their name and phone number and get a text when their food is ready.
“Especially since we don’t have a megaphone, people just know to come pick up their orders,” he said. “Sometimes too soon.”