Ritual Founder Attributes Rapid Growth to Slow Start
*By Amanda Weston*
Food pickup app Ritual has big expansion plans. But its founder says the company's rapid growth can actually be traced back to a slower start.
"Ritual's about your neighborhood, and I think what a lot of other companies did differently was they tried to go too broad too quickly, and they just lack the depth and coverage that Ritual has," Ray Reddy, co-founder and CEO of Ritual, told Cheddar Wednesday. "And we still approach the world neighborhood by neighborhood, and ensure that it's actually compelling."
"There's enough coffee and lunch assortment in every neighborhood, and I think we've really just gotten the model right over the last few years, and so now that that's baked, we're able to move really, really fast."
Ritual bills itself as an app that connects restaurants with customers, offering a simple, time-saving tool to arrange lunch orders for both individuals and workplace teams.
The company announced Wednesday it has expanded into the U.K. and Australia, with more plans for European growth. It is also set to be in more than 40 North American cities and have more than triple its merchant count by the end of 2019.
The food app space is growing increasingly more crowded, but Reddy isn't fazed by the competition.
"It makes sense to have a first party app to focus on maybe your top five to 10 percent of your customers, but the remaining 80 percent are likely going to be on apps like Ritual or other types of third parties," Reddy said. "As a brand, your choice is do you want to still have a conversation with those customers? Do you want to still market to them even if you can't through the app directly? And I think the answer for the most part is yes."
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/food-app-ritual-is-cooking-up-big-growth-for-2019).
LeBron James has agreed to an exclusive deal with Fanatics Collectibles. James and his son, Bronny, will appear together on a unique sports trading card to herald the Los Angeles Lakers superstar’s new multiyear partnership with Fanatics.
Joe Zhao, Managing Partner at Millennia Capital, joined Cheddar to discuss the latest stock moves and how the market is being impacted by artificial intelligence.
Wall Street was quiet early following a lackluster session a day earlier as markets await U.S. inflation data and high-profile corporate earnings reports later in the week.
The World Economic Forum says false and misleading information supercharged with cutting-edge artificial intelligence is the top immediate risk to the global economy.
CES 2024 starts this week in Las Vegas. It's set to feature swaths of the latest advances and gadgets across personal tech, transportation, health care, sustainability and more. Here's a list of the coolest announcements so far.
Astronauts will have to wait until next year before flying to the moon and another few years before landing on it. NASA on Tuesday announced the latest round of delays in its Artemis moon-landing program.
The Biden administration has enacted a new labor rule that aims to prevent the misclassification of workers as independent contractors. The labor department rule going into effect Tuesday replaces a scrapped Trump-era standard that lowered the bar for classifying employees as contractors
The KC-46 was to be the ideal candidate for a fixed-price development program. Instead, it has cost Boeing billions, and made industry wary of such deals.
Dave Long, CEO and Co-Founder of Orangetheory Fitness joins Cheddar to chat trends in the industry for 2024. He updates us on the company's plans to expand and what the state of the economy has meant for business.
