Food Delivery Service Fluc Hopes to Become Fixture in San Francisco

Food Delivery Service Fluc Hopes to Become Fixture in San Francisco

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Food delivery service has gained enormous popularity in the Bay Area, and it’s easy to understand why. Bustling restaurants can account for time wasted, calling for reservations sometimes feels like a choir, and transit options in the city can add up. So why not stay home, put your feet up and opt for an alternative to dining out. 


Fluc -- which stands for Food Lovers United Corp -- originally spawned from the minds of founders Tim Davis, Pako Magdaleno and Adam Ahmad. The three formerly lived together in a house in Silicon Valley nicknamed the “Hacker Fortress” and due to what sounds like hellish living conditions and a poor cooking environment, it was only a matter of time before they launched their own food delivery service. 

“We cultivated the idea of getting any restaurant food delivered from our own pains of constantly having to go out to our favorite eateries,” Ahmad said in an email. “The idea was purely out of our need initially and then we realized many other people had this same problem. Fluc was born.”

Fluc launched early this year, first deploying a small team of drivers (what Fluc calls “food lovers”) to deliver food from a few restaurants in the Palo Alto and Menlo Park area. Soon enough, the company was seeing 20 percent weekly growth and enabling 86 percent of establishments that don’t have delivery to offer it, according to Ahmad. 

In September, Fluc announced that it will expand its service to Mountain View and San Francisco, where people have access to over 200 different restaurants. But there still remains one big question for the company: Can Fluc co-exist in an already saturated market of food delivery services? 

Currently, big players in the industry include EAT Club, Munchery, Eat24, Delivery.com and GrubHub Seamless (the last of which already processes about 130,000 orders per day). So what separates Fluc from the rest of the field? Well, it may be in the details. 

The three founders have focused their enterprise onboarding restaurants without the need of waiting around for them to sign up. They upload menus by a simple snapshot which runs through an OCR system (optical character recognition). And the addition of a newly built interactive app may give them an edge over their competition. 

“Ordering from Fluc is a really interactive experience,” Ahmad said. “Everything’s in real-time so you can see where your food lover (driver) is moving every step of the way.”

Fluc operates during normal lunch and business hours (from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and 5 p.m.-10 p.m.). The company charges a small $5.95 flat delivery fee with a modest menu pricing hike across the board (around 8 percent). You can download their app on the iOS platform

Follow @nicktrenchard on Twitter to stay connected with the latest in Bay Area tech

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