Ritual Wants You to Make Virtual Coffee Runs With Piggyback

Ritual is making the team coffee run even easier to figure out with the announcement of their new feature, Piggyback.

The Toronto-based lunch and coffee concierge platform is unveiling the option to ask other Ritual users at your work to pick up your order, saving you time if you can’t get away from work and rewarding the retriever with Ritual points.

The option is called Piggyback and is out now in Ritual’s major markets including Toronto, Chicago, New York, L.A. and Boston. Piggyback saw a long beta period before officially being unveiled.

Here’s how it works: if you and a group of colleagues want to order coffee together, there’s no need to jot everything down on a notepad and send out one person to wait while four complex drinks are made over the span of 20 minutes.

Instead, the person who wants to go grab everything places an order, and when the others log into Ritual they will see the name of their colleague and can just tap and customize their coffee order. Everyone pays separately, the original orderer heads out to grab everyone’s drinks (but don’t try to balance more than four) and collects a bunch of extra points on the way. Those points can be redeemed for dollars to spend on the next coffee or lunch purchase. Piggyback can also be used for lunch, or really anything you can order through Ritual.

The company’s CEO Ray Reddy dubbed it the “virtual coffee run,” and as we all may know, going out to buy coffee is a normal part of many people’s days. If that time can be saved and put towards real work, or even free time, everyone’s life improves.

Ritual was created to help personalize quick-service restaurants, and Piggyback allows users to value their time even more while still maintaining a sense of community. It might even introduce you to some new colleagues at your work who hop onto your order.

“If your employees buy one coffee and three lunches each week, they will spend nearly one hour waiting for their food. Ritual integrates effortlessly into their day and saves them and your company time in a simple and efficient way,” reads the company’s site.

In a chat at Elevate Toronto’s NewCo, Reddy described the Piggyback feature as “almost disrupting their disruption of the quick-order platform.” Adding the ability to pick up someone else’s order is almost enough to be its own platform, but it represented a logical step for Ritual to take.

Ritual is quickly expanding into new neighbourhoods and cities, and hopes to break into the U.K. and the rest of Europe soon.