Where Meals Are Delivered
We have always had a good hunch where our customers were located. But enough of gut decisions; we wanted to confirm it.
For the past year Munchery has served thousands of meals across the beautiful city of San Francisco and we wanted to take a closer look at the data. Here’s a peek at what the order geography looks like today:
We are thrilled to report that we have fulfilled orders from every possible ZIP code in San Francisco, including Treasure Island. Honestly, we didn’t even know that Treasure Island was officially part of San Francisco when we first started Munchery.
To satisfy our own curiosity, we overlayed the previous order chart with the distribution of our customer base across all the neighborhoods. We want to see which neighborhoods have a larger customer base than others, and check whether there are any big discrepancies (such as a small percentage of customers ordering a lot, or a large percentage of customers making few orders). The below chart shows that for the most part, percentages of orders and customers align.
SOMA is King
Currently one neighborhood dominates in the Munchery statistics: SOMA. It’s a large one too. Random urban trivia for today: SOMA has not one, not two, but three separate ZIP codes: 94103 (“classic” SOMA?), 94105 (towards Embarcadero), and 94107, which overlaps with Potrero Hill! See the map below if you are not familiar with the area. In reality the bar chart for SOMA would be off the charts if we were to combine these three zones together.
Why SOMA?
As many of you are aware SOMA is one of the top areas in the city for new business growth. It has plenty of modernized office space at reasonable prices, plus it’s near many transportation hubs including Caltrain, BART, Muni and freeway access.
Munchery’s early adopters are busy professionals, many of whom are startup entrepreneurs working long hours that left them little time for shopping, prepping and cooking food. They were screaming for an alternative to greasy takeout. Knowing that our delicious meals bring joy to the people hatching bold, new ideas positively gives us goosebumps! The additional added convenience of online ordering, reliable delivery, and affordability over almost any other similar option makes us a no-brainer mealtime decision. We sincerely thank these early adopters for their continued support.
Of course, we are quickly spreading out from SOMA. There’s recognizable growth in Russian Hill and Nob Hill, followed by the Mission and Bernal neighborhoods.
The Delight of New Parents
Customers from Noe Valley make up another key group: many of them have young children (yup, this fits the family-friendly stereotype that Noe has). But of course we have parents as customers all over town. In case you didn’t know, San Francisco is not a family-dominated city. Only about 58,000 households have children (versus 265,000 households that don’t). Out of these 58,000 households, we are delighted to serve this group since they arguably need our service the most (our gift cards are also a super popular gift for new parents).
Who Tips And How Much
This is a sensitive topic for everyone. Shortly after we provided customers the ability to tip our delivery drivers online via their credit card, we took extra measures to ensure each customer is treated with the highest level of service, regardless of their tipping rate. Our billing system ensures that we are blind to that data on a per-customer basis. But as an aggregate, we couldn’t help but take a peek at how the tipping data we do have aligns with geography. Here’s the complete chart with the median tip dollar amount per order.
Keep in mind that this data only accounts for credit card tips, and does not include cash tips that many of our generous customers also give out. Nevertheless, we just think it’s interesting to look at the aggregate data (we’re all geeks). A typical credit card tip is about $3 to $5 per order.
So, how else do we interpret all this data? It’s interesting, but I think that’s about it. It’s not something we want to over-analyze or come to any hasty conclusions about. As we look at the geographical distribution, it only emboldens our efforts to democratize the personal chef experience.
