We caught up with the brilliant and insightful MICHAEL PIGNATARO a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

MICHAEL, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you have any advice regarding quality control and maintaining quality as your brand grows?

At EatsBC, we stand out for our commitment to supporting local restaurants. As a family-owned business, our goal is to offer food merchants the opportunity to expand their reach beyond their brick-and-mortar establishments. By linking you with hungry customers seeking the most delectable local cuisine in their vicinity, EatsBC helps you grow your business.

Our emphasis is on providing excellent customer service and clear communication. We stay in touch with our customers from the moment they place their order, keeping them informed throughout the entire process. We communicate through text messages, phone calls, emails, and app notifications to ensure a seamless experience.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic the City of Battle Creek’s Small Business Development Office with assistance from ‘corePHP’, launched the communities’ very own online and mobile food-ordering marketplace. Eatsbc.com is a dynamic prepared food directory for the community. Many of our prepared food operators were not set up for delivery or online sales and the fees charged by alternative platforms were costly which raised prices and cost to the customer and businesses significantly.

The City’s team quickly assembled a community platform to advance the online capabilities and exposure of our local businesses. Food service establishments can register with EatsBC, create an account, login, enter their menu, and specify if they are dine-in, pick-up and/or delivery. The site and app can take a customer’s order and accept payment, then send the order to the restaurant.

Our goal was to provide a low-cost online presence and point of sales gateway, to increase exposure and drive as much business as is possible to the local food producers. Similar services have very large fees which cut into the business profitability. EatsBC is an affordable community platform.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I met my two co-founders in different ways. Steven Pignataro is my twin brother, so I have known him my entire life. I met Jonathan Galbreath through my brother Jonathan. The three of us share a similar mindset, so our goals, expectations, and vision were well aligned.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Our business has been fortunate to collaborate with the city’s small business development team through the following link: https://smallbusinessbattlecreek.com/. They have been invaluable in assisting us with marketing and funding small initiatives to improve the application we use to manage our operations. Additionally, they have facilitated our connection with other restaurants that have joined our platform, allowing us to scale and grow our business more rapidly. Working closely with this team has been instrumental in our success.   

Contact Info:

• Website: https://eatsbc.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eats_bc/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TeamEatsBC
• Other: https://about.eatsbc.com/