Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Andrew Glantz. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Andrew, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Giving back has always been important to me, and I noticed a trend that many individuals were increasingly looking to support businesses that make a positive social impact. However, with restaurants, the incentives (outside of good food and a good experience), were mainly financial — discounts and coupons — and didn’t build an emotional connection between the customer and the restaurant. Pulling from social ventures like Toms Shoes, and from trends like food photos being shared on social media, I came up with the idea for GiftAMeal: a simple concept where each time a customer takes a photo of their food or drink at a partner restaurant, we donate to a local food bank to give a meal to someone in need. Restaurants get uplifting promotion and customers get a free way to engage in an experience that helps their community.

Andrew, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

With GiftAMeal, it’s all about creating an easy win-win. I’m a big believer in models that do well while doing good, and that profit and purpose can be consistent goals. Restaurants pay a monthly subscription to a part of GiftAMeal, and then for each photo taken through our app, we donate to a local food bank to cover its cost of distributing 1 meal’s worth of healthy food to a neighborhood pantry where those in need can access it. It’s completely free for customers at a restaurant to participate. They simply download the free mobile app, select the restaurant, and take a photo. Posting on GiftAMeal is one meal, and then the customer is given the option to share their photo on social media, and we give an extra meal for each platform they share on. We recently surpassed 1 million meals provided through over 500 restaurant partners in 25 states!

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

As we looked for new ways to get in front of potential partner restaurants, we experimented with a Facebook ad targeted at restaurant owners in our hometown city of St. Louis. However, the audience targeting wasn’t set up properly and we ended up having a restaurant in New Hampshire see the ad and request a demo. We had a new employee starting up that week so I gave it to him as practice, since at that time we really only had restaurants in St. Louis. He ended up signing them up, the restaurant had great success on the program, and that helped prove to ourselves that we could do this all over the country. And here we are now in 25 states later!

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Building our reputation has been super important as a social venture. We make sure to be transparent about the donations we make to the food banks and always act with integrity in our decision-making. Getting the word out about GiftAMeal through media publicity and trade publications has also been extremely helpful at establishing credibility.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.giftameal.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/giftameal
• Facebook: facebook.com/giftameal
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/giftameal
• Twitter: twitter.com/giftameal
• Other: giftameal.com/download