The past few months have been a golden age for online food delivery platforms like Grubhub, Caviar, Doordash and ChowNow. With restaurants closing their doors to in-person diners during the coronavirus pandemic, delivery and takeout orders have been the only options for eating out. That’s great news for third-party food ordering platforms, but not so great for restaurants and their customers.
These third-party platforms have to make money somehow, so they often charge restaurants to use them, add service fees to customer bills or mark up menu prices. This can mean customers are paying more money to get the same food from their favorite restaurants, or restaurants are paying a premium to get access to their usual customers.
Chicago upstart Togo launched to provide an alternative to these third-party services.
At its essence, Togo is an online directory and search engine with over 2,300 restaurants in the Chicago area. Each of these restaurants has a dedicated page with business information and a phone number or link so you can order directly from the restaurant. If the restaurant only does online ordering through a third-party service, then Togo will link to that. But Togo’s goal is to make it as easy as possible to find a specific restaurant and order directly from it. It also doesn’t require customers to provide any personal data.
Togo spun out as an idea from digital marketing agency Covert Nine. Web designer and Covert Nine President Tim Toomey started Togo with his team as a WordPress theme that makes it easier for restaurants to accept online orders. The team then referenced Dining at a Distance to get a database of Chicago restaurants, cleaned it up, and created a website and searchable directory around it. The agency also tapped Mallory Phillips to design parts of the site, the logo and brand imagery.
Togo released its WordPress theme for free, so restaurants that know how to build a WordPress-based website can set it up on their own. But plenty of restaurant owners don’t have the tech savvy to build their own website, since their priority is making and selling food. So Togo also offers to build, host and design websites for these restaurants for a monthly fee. After all, designing websites is what Covert Nine does as a business.
Still, Togo makes it easy for restaurants to use its services for free if they’d like to, and it’s looking to get more partners and beta testers on board as the company gains momentum.
Toomey sees Togo as an open source and community-supported project, to allow restaurants to thrive in the age of digital ordering. He also envisions other ways to make the Togo directory useful for consumers. One idea is through adding a more robust tagging system that go beyond the usual “pizza” or “vegan” tags and mark businesses that are “minority-owned” or “women-owned.”
Above all, Toomey told Built In that he doesn’t want customers to “feel the guilt of paying third-party services” in order to support their local restaurants.
