OrangeCrate Brings Quality Food Delivery to Rural Communities

Writing for Owners Mag, I get to hear from many entrepreneurs. Learning about their successes is always very intriguing. No two stories are alike. Sometimes, I hear stories that make me think, ‘man if only I came up with that idea!’ or ‘this guy is a genius.’ But my favorite stories don’t go that way at all.

Take Andrew Simmons’ story, for example. He founded OrangeCrate, a service that specializes in delivering food in rural communities. It’s not a game-changing app or a flashy new product. It’s a service – a simple enough service – that owes its success to Andrew’s entrepreneurial spirit. He identified a problem and came up with a solution.

You may have never thought much about your food’s journey from the restaurant to your doorstep. Or maybe you’ve come to expect poor quality when you order delivery. But thanks to Andrew Simmons, OrangeCrate is looking to change all of that.

Tell me about OrangeCrate.

ANDREW: We built OrangCrate under the premise that rural communities needed to have restaurant deliveries as well. When we started (in Ramona, CA), the larger players were not in our space at all. We’re like a tier 3, tier 4 city. DoorDash, Grubhub, and Postmates were all in the tier 1 cities. It was just low-hanging fruit.

We launched about 6 years ago to a bunch of restaurants that said it was the dumbest idea they’d ever heard. They thought no one would actually pay to have food delivered, even though places like dominoes have been doing it for years. In our market, we only had Domino’s Pizza and maybe Pizza Hut. There were about 44 restaurants that had no delivery whatsoever, so that was our first foray into it. We did one or two orders per day for a couple of weeks, and that started to slowly build more volume from word of mouth.

Now you have franchises set up in different towns?

ANDREW: I wouldn’t call them franchises. It’s more like a licensing agreement. When we were running Ramona, we were making ‘ok money,’ but we knew that we could use our whole back-end operations to power other locations. Our second location was in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. We had two drivers work for us in Ramona. They got married and wanted to be closer to family. So, they moved back home and started the second OrangeCrate. We used that experience to learn how to open up more locations. We look for people who have the hustle but don’t have the money to open up their own franchise or get a license. Then, we teach them what we know about working with restaurants and drivers, and then we completely fund everything they need.

If you can hustle, we completely cover the cost to start up that business share the profits at 50/50. And at a pretty high level. It’s gross food sales minus cost, and we split it 50/50 from there. We cover everything they needed from payroll to marketing. At the end of the month, we make about 8% from every city, and they make about 49%.

What were some hurdles you guys faced in the first couple of years that you weren’t expecting?

ANDREW: The insurance was a huge hurdle for us. We were able to work a deal with an insurance company that we paid on a per order basis rather than overall. Usually, insurance is like 75k a year per city, but we were able to come to an agreement with a company where it worked out to something like 40 cents an order. That made it more favorable for us to grow and expand.
Although we did start in a rural market and we’ve expanded into rural markets, over the years, we’ve bought other restaurant delivery services, which is why we’re in bigger places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Pensacola, Florida.

Was the goal always to start rural and then go into more populated towns?

ANDREW: No. There were so many rural communities out there, and we felt that we could be in those communities and not be touched by DoorDash or UberEATS. Since then, DoorDash and those larger companies have tried to make inroads into the rural communities, but they then run into trouble finding drivers. You can find plenty of drivers in large metropolitan areas – I should take that back. You could find lots of drivers before the stimulus payments. Nowadays, it’s a hustle within itself to find drivers. You make more money staying home.

The side hustle has been undercut by these stimulus checks.

ANDREW: Right

How were you guys able to have an edge in the rural communities over DoorDash and GrubHub?

ANDREW: With OrangeCrate, we teach all of our drives how to deliver food properly. We use a certain health standard bag. It maintains the temperature you have to keep the food at – both cold and hot.
It’s the whole customer service with the consumer and how you dress to make that food delivery. We’re building a standard called Deliver Safe that teaches other drivers how to do the same thing in other markets.

One of the things with DoorDash and UberEATS is the driver grabs the food in the bag from the restaurant, they toss it in the front seat of the car, drive to wherever, and hand it off to the consumer. But if it was hot food when it left the restaurant, it’s lukewarm by the time it gets to the consumer – or worse. There’s no care in extending the restaurant’s brand once the driver leaves the restaurant. With our smaller services, we have this hands-on approach with the restaurants. It’s all local: local delivery, local service, local people. That tends to resonate better than national delivery companies that don’t seem to care other than to collect money from the restaurant.

Most people don’t put much thought into the distance between a restaurant and their home, but that plays a huge part. I know many restaurants are apprehensive about delivery because they can plate up the food and have it be served just right in their restaurant. But, there’s an X factor with the delivery driver where they don’t know what it will look like on the other end.

ANDREW: Exactly. From our experience, we’ve seen all sorts of drivers from the other services. Even within our community, DoorDash has tried to move into Ramona. They have one driver up here, and we see him using those flimsy bags that aren’t keeping anything hot or cold.

For Las Cruces, New Mexico, we deliver to White Sands Air Force Base, which I think is 25 miles away. We’re able to keep food at that approximate temperature for up to 60 minutes by the time we get it to the consumer. They can still have hot food from Joe’s BBQ shack, whereas the same food coming from DoorDash, assuming they would even go that far – they usually limit their distance to 7 miles, they lose a lot of the warmth factor of their food. Not to mention how it’s handled.

What was an ‘I made it’ moment for OrangeCrate?

ANDREW: I don’t know if this was exactly an ‘I made it’ moment but, we started in 2016 with about $5k to start up the company. We now do revenue in excess of 6 million a year. This past year we paid off almost $300,000 in debt to come into 2021 completely debt-free.

I don’t know if there’s one moment but knowing how we do what we do – it works for us. As such, it’s allowed me to do things for myself. I volunteer at the RMDA (Restaurant Marketing and Delivery Association). It’s about 700 independent companies like myself. I’m able to take time out of my day and help them – mentor them on how to grow in their markets. Many of them are smaller than me, some of them are bigger.

How was COVID for OrangeCrate?

ANDREW: COVID was actually pretty good for OrangeCrate. Pretty good for most delivery services. It wasn’t great for restaurants. I also own a restaurant. We bought it a month before COVID became a thing. It was this 40-year-old Italian restaurant in Ramona. It was a treasure. Everyone was sad that it was leaving, but it was struggling to survive before COVID.

We bought it because we knew delivery, so we figured that’s how we would turn things around. (Due to COVID) we ended up essentially breaking even for the year even though we upped the delivery. We couldn’t do any dine-in whatsoever for a long time. Now that’s all starting to come back, so we think it will be a good investment for us, but that’s a whole other aspect to what we do that was new to learn. We ended up losing something like $10,000/month on the restaurant end, but we made up for it on the OrangeCrate end.

Before the pandemic, restaurants viewed delivery services as not as critical to their existence as dine-in. As soon as COVID hit, and they could no longer do dine-in, we had to help so many restaurants pivot to delivery. And if a restaurant wasn’t known for doing delivery, it was an uphill battle for marketing to get food in front of the consumer. But we did it. In Ramona, we didn’t lose a single restaurant that I know of within our own community.

Sounds like that’s in large part because of you.

ANDREW: Yes.

Do you have a ballpark percentage on how much your deliveries went up last year?

ANDREW: I’d say probably about 130% year over year but I’d have to look at the numbers to be certain.

There’s a spectrum of entrepreneurs. On one end, there’s that person who says, ‘I want to be in business for myself. How do I do that?’ Then there’s that other person who ends up going into business for themselves because they have a product or a service that was a great idea, and they had to see it through. Where do you see yourself in that spectrum?

ANDREW: I’m the first one. I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 14 years old. My first job was working at a fruit stand in Colorado where I literally rode by on my bike, and they screamed ‘Hey, boy!’ for me to come over and help them. I ended up running the fruit stand for them. Pops and Edith: they were older than dirt. I started moving produce from the bins to the truck to running my own location for them.
At some point, the Mac 128 came out. I opened up a graphic design business. A couple of years after that, I ended up owning a digital print shop.

It’s actually kind of funny. I bought my first digital press from Xerox in ‘96. It’s a million-dollar press and, you know I have no money. So, I fill out the documentation and everything. And Xerox calls my bank, and my bank says, ‘he has low 3 figures in his bank account,’ and Xerox thinks they misheard, and they said low 6 figures, and they delivered me this million-dollar press. It was awesome. It was a mistake on their part that helped me grow my business significantly. And after that, I bought a second digital press, and we did great.

I ended up selling the company and doing sales for a number of years. Then about 15 years ago, my wife and I adopted 6 kids together all at once. We had to decide which one of our jobs was more stable because one of us would have to quit to help take care of them. I ended up quitting. I knew I could always find a way to make money. Years later, I started OrangeCrate.

Last thing: any words of wisdom for entrepreneurs trying to get their idea off the ground?

ANDREW: Just keep at it. There’s plan A and if that doesn’t work, there’s 25 remaining letters in the alphabet.