Peach is expanding.
The Seattle-based lunch delivery service is now operating in San Diego, Xconomy reports. This is the first expansion outside of Seattle for the startup, which launched less than one year ago.
Peach delivers lunch orders to offices around the city with a rather simple transaction process that does not include a delivery fee. Each morning, Peach sends a text message to members with a link for that day’s selected dish. Customers have an hour to place an order by responding with a “yes” text, and their food will show up an hour later at a pre-determined office space. You can also order via the Peach website.
Peach makes money by sharing revenue with partnering restaurants. The company, which raised $2.7 million in July from Maveron, Madrona Venture Group, and Vulcan Inc., now serves more than 90 offices in the Seattle region and paid out $1 million to restaurant partners in 2014.
Ex-Amazon engineer Nishant Singh founded Peach with former Amazon colleagues Denis Bellavance and Chenyu Wang. The startup faces tons of competition from a bevy of companies that deliver food like new startups Caviar, Munchery, SpoonRocket, Peachd, Lish, FoodPanda, Plated, Bitesquad, and Postmates, to more veteran players in the industry like Yelp-owned Eat24, GrubHub, and GrubHub-owned Seamless. Even Uber is trying to deliver lunch now, too.
However, Peach seems to have separated itself a bit by only delivering to office locations with 50 or more users and focusing only on lunch — for now, at least.
We’ve reached out to the company for more details on the expansion and we’ll update this post when we hear back.
Update: Peach Head of Marketing Andrew Bleiman told GeekWire that the company expanded to San Diego “because of the concentration of medium to large tech firms in Sorrento Valley, Torrey Pines, Kearney Mesa and the surrounding areas who were far from great lunch options.”
“The fact that it was in the same time zone, which conferred ops and customer service advantages, and a relatively easy flight from Seattle also contributed,” he added.
Bleiman noted that Peach now employs 25 and will be hiring more for its San Diego operations soon.
