Hungry is one of the leading foodservice brokers serving the corporate office lunch market in greater Boston. The company also organizes one-off corporate events.
Heritage Food Truck Catering has a close partnership with Hungry because the company’s entire strategy and culture is chef-focused. This creates an excellent match with Heritage Food Truck Catering, which is itself chef-centric. Our Executive Chef Lorena is one of the leading providers of lunches for Hungry. Meals are listed on the Hungry web site under her name rather than Heritage Food Truck Catering.
In addition, Heritage’s sister company Stock Pot Malden, our shared kitchen incubator, is also, as of this writing, the home of seven other food entrepreneurs catering to corporate customers through Hungry.
The business model used by Hungry is attractive to Heritage for a variety of reasons:
- Hungry takes care of all aspects of delivery and service for its clients, allowing the catering company to focus on designing and preparing the food.
- Heritage sets its own price. Hungry provides some coaching on price points, but lets the catering company figure out its optimal price, with the understanding that lower prices do drive more demand than higher prices. Profitability with Hungry is significantly better than with brokers levying a fixed commission percentage on a mandated low price (and they often also put the burden and cost of delivery and service on the catering company).
- There is no waste involved, allowing Heritage to meet its sustainability goals. The catering company has enough lead time to buy the exactly right quantity of ingredients and mobilize the right amount of labor for each job.
- All orders are firm and paid for quickly. Unlike other brokers who ask the catering company to take the risk of seeing a subpar number of guests show up on any given day, Hungry asks its clients for fixed orders, therefore removing the commercial risk for the catering company.
- Culturally, Hungry’s young and enthusiastic people know how to create a strong emotional bond with chefs, allowing the development of true rapport between them that transcends the traditionally transactional supplier-broker relationship.
While Hungry is agnostic on the types of foods it represents, it also plays an important role in Heritage’s ambition to transform the agriculture-food-health value chain in Massachusetts. One of Heritage’s goals is to replace the traditional Big Food-Big Ag-Big Health paradigm by offering locally-sourced, locally prepared meals that lead to good health through nutrition and utilize the ethnic and cultural diversity of the greater Boston area’s cuisines. Through the unique relationships Hungry builds with significant employers, it allows Heritage to grow and scale faster than we would be able to through our own business channels.