As a group of college students themselves, Jason Queen, Nick Taranto and Mai Shachi work to make food delivery as convenient as it gets with the app EnvoyNow.
Anthony Zhang, junior business administration major at the University of Southern California, is the CEO of EnvoyNow and started the service at his campus about a year and a half ago. Now, the app has teams of employees and consultants at around six to eight different schools across the country and continues to grow.
EnvoyNow is a student-to-student food delivery app. Customers download the app on their phone or other mobil device, sign up with their university email address, link their credit card and are good to go!
“We partner with local restaurants and deliver to wherever [the student is] on campus,” said Queen.
Queen, junior government and politics major with a minor in innovation and entrepreneurship, is the strategic partnership manager for the app. He said that since he is a student, he is able to infiltrate the student organization market better than his competitors which are mostly run by graduates or people no longer in college.
Queen has created promotional codes for certain campus groups already including ones for specific sororities and fraternities. He hopes to increase the amount of people who download the app by offering these promotions and deals.
The EnvoyNow UMD team distributes flyers to residents in dorms in hopes of increasing the amount of Freshmen who use the app.
With a $2.99 flat delivery fee, the envoys (drivers) make around $15-$20 per hour. They set their own hours with the app being available from 6 p.m. until 12 a.m. Queen said hours will soon shift to begin at 4 p.m. to accommodate more customers who want earlier dinners or even late lunches.
Queen emphasized the importance of the envoys to the entire operation. “We wouldn’t be successful at all without them,” he said. “[They’re] making friends with a smile on their face.”
The envoys know that school comes first. With 20 of them on the EnvoyNow team in College Park, Queen said it works out with them all making their own hours and they have not yet run out of people to make deliveries.
While Queen’s main priority is to supervise the envoys and contract new restaurants to partner with, Taranto and Shachi are the marketing managers. They work with restaurants to establish goals and build a solid image throughout campus.
Queen said restaurants benefit from the partnership through “increased access to customers they didn’t have before.”
The national average delivery time for food ordered through the app is 28 minutes, with 7.2 minutes being the national average time between the envoy leaving the restaurant and the student receiving his or her order.
EnvoyNow is currently partnered with NuVegan Cafe, Blaze Pizza, Chipotle and Sweetgreen. “Three new College Park favorites are on the way,” Queen said.
Those interested in joining the team can go to their website to sign up and download the app. Student groups interested in a promotion code can contact Queen at jqueen@envoynow.co.
