Free food is a tried-and-true motivator, so it’s no surprise employers turn to this tactic when they want to lure workers back to their desks or attract top talent. But feeding an entire office every day can be a logistical nightmare and quickly overload an office administrator.
Michael Rondinaro thinks Parkday, an app he launched in Brooklyn in 2021, is the solution. Parkday provides food delivery much like Grubhub or DoorDash but is designed specifically for group orders to corporate offices.
Here’s how it works: Employees download their own versions of the Parkday app. On Sundays, Parkday presents eight-item menus to the entire office for each in-office work day during the week ahead, usually with options from two restaurants. Employees make their selections, then Parkday submits them to vendor restaurants as one group order. A Parkday courier picks up the order and delivers it to the office.
Those eight-item menus, which vary by day, are curated using artificial intelligence. Parkday solicits information about its users, from taste preferences to dietary needs, ingredient allergies, lifestyle, goals and more. It then aggregates that data and suggests office-wide menus that meet as many wants and needs as possible. Parkday collects this information on a rolling basis, too, so if user feedback changes, the app can adapt its offerings.
AI dictates how each individual experiences the app. “Everything is super personalized,” Rondinaro said. “Your feed is going to look different than mine in terms of the meals that are in front of you, even though it’s the same eight underlying options, different ones are going to get pushed to the front for you.” Perhaps an employee has told the app they are training for a marathon; the tool will present meals accordingly.
The app also uses artificial intelligence to streamline the process on the vendor side. Not every restaurant is equally equipped to prepare large-scale orders, so the Parkday tool uses its data to predict how many employees will be in an office on any given day. If a company has a massive employee base and its busiest in-office day is Wednesday, the app is probably not going to put a tiny mom-and-pop restaurant on the menu that day, for example.
The appeal of the ordering process, Rondinaro said, is there is no guessing how many sandwiches are needed or what toppings people want on their pizza, therefore minimizing food waste and cutting out unnecessary costs.
“You already have it on your phone and everybody can go in there and choose individually, so it’s much easier for the office managers and easier for the employees to just pick what they want themselves,” said an employee at Smartly, an AI advertising company that uses Parkday at its office in the Financial District.
The limited menu also simplifies the process for Parkday’s vendors, allowing them to order ingredients in advance and avoid customization costs.
Parkday estimates its meals are about $20 per employee with each order having a 15 meal minimum. A spokesperson for the company said it can accommodate employers with anywhere from 50 to 1,000 employees. Its current clients’ average headcount is about 400.
Rondinaro sees his competitors to be more of the mainstream delivery apps than traditional corporate caterers. Parkday is geared toward companies with capital on hand to offer perks like free food to their employees, and many of those firms have previously turned to delivery apps to provide that service, either through group ordering or stipends. He believes Parkday is the more efficient version of that service for offices.
But Parkday also has to compete with a growing trend in some of Manhattan’s buzziest commercial real estate buildings, and that’s the rise of restaurants being built to cater directly to tenants. Take JPMorgan’s new Park Avenue headquarters, for example, which boasts a 19-restaurant food hall with desk-side delivery. Parkday cannot compete with that, at least not right now. Instead, it’s targeting smaller firms still in their growth stages that are able to dish out cash to offer food as a perk but are not necessarily investing in amenities like in-house restaurants on their own.
On the other hand, creative approaches to getting workers back to the office are still being embraced with open arms in New York, where in-office occupancy remains just under 60% of pre-pandemic levels, according to data from Kastle Systems. (Other sources put that figure in the 70% range.)
Parkday, to be sure, is small but nimble. It has about a half-dozen corporate employees, 40 couriers who work as independent contractors, 15 office clients and 150 vendors. The company had a small pre-seed funding round in 2021 raising just $620,000 but quickly reached positive cash flow.
Its clients are mostly tech companies, including the firms Attentive, Stellar Health and Clay, all of which have space in Manhattan. Listed vendors include Sunday in Brooklyn, Miss Ada, Teranga, Eataly and more.
Next up for Parkday is expansion outside New York. “We’ve been client-led to every single location we’ve gone to,” Rondinaro said. “We went to Chicago for a client, we went to Houston for a client, and in the spring, we’re going to London for a client.”
