Student-run food delivery company keeps growing

After nearly a year in business, Envoy, a student-operated food delivery company at USC has continued to expand. What began as a Facebook page has evolved into an iOS App that now operates on two campuses.

The company has collaborated with Chipotle, Pizza Studio and Chick-fil-A, among other restaurants, to deliver their food to students. In order to have their food delivered, students simply download the app, order what food they would like and wait for student workers to deliver their food. The delivery workers have the same app as the customer, said Chad Massura, a sophomore majoring in business administration and co-founder of the company.

“They get all of the information of the order, they go to the restaurant,” he said. “They swipe with an Envoy-provided debit card. And then they bike, skateboard, drive, whatever they want to do, to the person that ordered.”

The deliverers, referred to by the company’s founders as “Envoys,” travel via skateboard, bike or car. The delivery fee is always $3, and students can also tip their Envoys.

The pay is commission-based for Envoys, who are independent contractors. Envoys can make up to $8 per order, according to Gabriel Quintela, a sophomore majoring in public relations and the chief operating officer of the company. Quintela said Envoys can also create a work schedule that complements their schedule.

“In terms of their hours, that’s also very flexible,” he said. “We allow them to go in and enter hours that they want to work.”

With the help of an engineering student, the Envoy founders created the website, envoy-now.com, and the app, EnvoyNow, which was released in late September. Envoy operates in the Los Angeles area as a Trojan-only company, as only those with a USC email address can deliver and order through the company.

“We only deliver within about a 1.2-mile radius around campus.” Quintela said.

Since the release of the app, the Envoy website only exists to give some background on the company and the founders, and provide a link to the app.

“Everything is done by the iPhone app that we have on the App Store,” Massura said. “We spent pretty much all this summer building that.”

A video on the company website shows Quintela dressed up as a pink gorilla passing out bananas to students in Leavey Library to promote Envoy.

“That was a goofy thing we did during finals because everyone is in Leavey not having a good time, not happy about their lives,” Massura said. “We tried to do something funny and liven up the place a little bit and get our name out there as well.”

Envoy has also started operating in the Midwest.  With the help of a friend, Anthony Zhang, a sophomore majoring in business administration and co-founder of Envoy, introduced EnvoyNow to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The company now has 1,300 users and 45 employees between both campuses, according to the founders. Zhang teamed up with Ethan Claes, a student from Wisconsin, to bring it to the campus.

“We reached out to him and said, ‘Hey, we know you’d be really good at this — we have a really unique experience for you.’ Kind of gave him all the background, gave him the application, a couple of marketing strategies and kinda of just let him go from there,” said Nick Wang, a sophomore majoring in business administration and the CFO of Envoy.

Claes was in charge of recruiting Envoys locally in Madison and working with restaurants to collaborate with the company. Wang believed that this opportunity would be unique for Claes.

“We decided to have him be our first launch of a new campus, and we did that on the week of Halloween,” Massura said. “It’s been going awesomely, he absolutely killed it. We have a bunch of cool restaurants, we have a bunch of people signed up, a bunch of new customers, orders are going well.”

Next semester, the Envoy founders expect to create the app for Android. The leaders also plan to expand to University of Indiana and UCLA, according to Quintela. The leaders of the company are currently working on a new version of the app, Massura said.

“There’s going to be a lot of cool stuff in that new version of the app,” he said. “That’s going to have a lot of new features. It’s going to allow us to be on more campuses. It’s going to change the entire experience.”