Square’s Caviar Launches Pick-up Service

Caviar, the on-demand food delivery startup owned by Square, is expanding into the pickup game. Starting today, customers in San Francisco, the San Francisco East Bay Area, Los Angeles and Portland can order food via Caviar for pickup.

“With pickup, our goal is to expand Caviar from a delivery service to a more robust and fully fledged food ordering platform for restaurants and diners,” said Caviar lead Gokul Rajaram.

The launch of Caviar Pickup is in part thanks to Square’s fresh acquisition of OrderAhead’s pickup business, but Rajaram said, “It’s not an ‘either or.’ It’s ‘and.’ We’ve been working on the pickup product feature within Caviar within the last few months. OrderAhead is more to accelerate our growth of pickup.”

Señor Sisig, the delicious Filipino fusion burrito truck, has been using Caviar Pickup in beta for the last few weeks. Typically, there’s a huge line for Señor Sisig during the lunch hours, so ordering ahead is guaranteed to save you a ton of time.

“It’s definitely revealed an opportunity for sizable new volume in terms of mobile orders,” Señor Sisig President Evan Kidera said in a statement. We understand how valuable our customers’ time is, and we recognize that our often long lines can be intimidating for new customers wanting to try our food.”

Square will continue to operate the OrderAhead app as is for the next several weeks to months, Rajaram said. Eventually, OrderAhead customers will get redirected to Caviar.

Although there are several food ordering apps (Postmates, Sprig, Munchery, UberEATS, etc) including ones that enable food ordering for pickup, Rajaram says what’s unique about Caviar is that it lives within Square.

“That allows us to build unique competencies” to help the restaurants better understand who their customers are and reach them once they leave.

Accessible via iOS and Android apps as well as through a desktop browser, Caviar has partnerships with more than 3,000 restaurants in nearly a dozen markets: New York City (Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens), Washington D.C., Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area (including the East Bay & Marin), Portland, Ore., and Seattle.

The pickup option, however, will not be available in all of these areas initially. The new Pickup feature is first launching in the Bay Area (San Francisco and the East Bay), Los Angeles, and Portland with the promise of expanding to all markets "soon." Square says that it will be available in New York this spring.