It’s not often someone quits their job on a whim and turns their gig job into a thriving international company, but dlivrd CEO Chris Heffernan did exactly that.
The company, founded in 2018, currently coordinates deliveries through their white-label, driver-pairing system, and it’s now one of the fastest-growing delivery companies in the U.S., specializing in last-mile, high-quality catering delivery logistics solutions for restaurants, same-day food, and e-commerce orders. It has a network of thousands of drivers and was given the top spot on Philly’s Fast 50 list with a 200% increase in revenue in the last year.
It all started in 2011, years before any food-delivery services we now know had been founded. Uber’s rideshare concept had been founded two years prior but hadn’t gone wide yet.
“There was a Delray Beach, Florida-based restaurant and they had cheesesteaks made, as locals would say, ‘the right way,’ and it had this little sticker offering delivery through Delivery Dudes or third-party drivers,” says Heffernan. “I thought it was cool because DoorDash and Uber Eats didn’t exist. Grubhub was around but in a limited capacity where they just sent orders to restaurants that already had their own drivers, like pizza or Chinese.
“I had been working at a telecommunications company for almost 10 years at that point,” he says. “I got a new boss, and let’s just say that wasn’t working out at all, so I quit.”
Heffernan bought the code for a website that sold shoes and turned it from a way to find size-9 sneakers to a way to purchase a cheeseburger cooked medium well. He called this app Foodcab.
“I was driving around delivering food that people ordered from Foodcab in the suburban Philadelphia area,” he says. “Fast forward from 2011 to 2018, Uber Eats, DoorDash and Caviar all now exist, and they’re destroying me because they’re all funded, and I’m just a guy who cashed out his 401K and had a leased Toyota Camry, driving around doing deliveries on my own.”
Fate stepped in when he was picking up a delivery at a chain restaurant. The manager mentioned to Heffernan that the $25 orders were fine, but he was really struggling with getting $250 lunch orders to the big pharmaceutical companies that were common at the time.
“He told me he got all these huge orders – essentially catering orders – at lunch, and it was really hard for him to scale if he couldn’t get the orders delivered. I said, ‘So, I don’t have to get the customers and I don’t have to pay the market or credit card fees? Yes, that’s totally doable.’
“I figured I could be a logistics engine, and it worked,” he adds. “We ran it for six Philadelphia-area restaurants and then started pitching to other restaurants by going on Craigslist and looking for job postings for catering drivers for restaurants.”
He emailed the postings and told them he would give them access to 100 drivers instead of just one. At that point, he decided to change the name from Foodcab to ‘dlivrd’ because he didn’t want to be pigeonholed into food only. Though food is still more than 90% of the company’s business today.
Soon, Heffernan expanded to Baltimore, then Washington, D.C., and, with an eye on being bicoastal, he went to San Francisco. It is now in 164 designated marketing areas (DMAs) throughout the U.S. and Canada.
The white-label solution operates behind the scenes, or “in the shadows,” as Heffernan describes it. The end customer orders from the integration partner or the restaurant itself.
“If you love Qdoba in Philadelphia and you order from the Qdoba app or website, you’re not going to know that ‘dlivrd’ exists because we white-label our tech and plug into their app. So you will see their branding, but it’s our system.”
‘dlivrd’ offers several advantages to drivers, and they encourage drivers to “multi-app,” meaning they have no expectations that they will drive with only one company exclusively. However, dlivrd offers additional benefits, such as larger order sizes resulting in larger earnings.
“The average earning on the on-demand apps is around $7 per order, but our average earning is about $42 per order,” Heffernan says. “We don’t offer as many jobs per day, but we focus on higher-quality, higher-earning opportunities, such as large corporate lunch orders. We can give drivers two of those a day and it’s better than taking 10 of the smaller orders.”
The company has a proprietary driver-matching software system built on AI that they refer to as Frederick.
“Frederick doesn’t just assign orders to drivers at random as a lot of the gig apps do,” Hefferman says. “Usually, they ping whoever is the closest, and that driver can accept or refuse. Frederick pairs the driver profile with the order profile, so you’re not going to get a MINI Cooper showing up to a $1,000 catering order, or a driver without catering bags, or a driver who’s not consistently on time.
“Frederick,” he adds, “will determine the best driver for the order and then offer it to them. If they swipe right – ala Tinder – they accept. This is where it gets exciting because we’re not arbitrarily saying, ‘Here’s a driver who will show up but this is a driver who fits your brand’s profile.’”
There is a subset of contractors called Emerald Drivers, after dlivrd’s brand color. These are the top 10% in any market, and they will get access to orders earlier and be offered the higher-value earnings jobs first. The company takes customer service very seriously, knowing that, although the drivers are independent contractors, they still represent the company as far as the end customer is concerned.
They are the last touchpoint for that transaction, and if the driver is late or rude, the customer is not likely to order from that restaurant again. The relationship for the restaurants is highly beneficial because as long as they have the capacity to prepare the food, they can grow and scale without delivering large orders being a barrier to service.
In November 2024, dlivrd announced a new partnership with GigSafe to bring greater tipping transparency to drivers on the dlivrd platform. One of the biggest hurdles in the gig industry is that drivers are not receiving the tips the customer has given and that manipulation or “funny business” occurs behind the scenes.
“One of the cornerstones of ‘dlivrd’ is transparency, as a lot of the gig apps don’t give full transparency to the drivers,” Heffernan concludes. “We were always very clear and shared any information we had with the drivers because we’re connecting with another businessperson – an independent contractor – and they need to make a business decision. The partnership with GigSafe is really the cherry on top of our transparency sundae.”
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