It turns out it’s not just North Americans that appreciate a quick turnaround on their lunch and coffee orders.<\/p>\n
Ritual has announced a massive new expansion as they head into two brand-new countries, the first time the Toronto company has operated outside of North America. Ritual is now operating in London and Sydney, as well as a host of new U.S. cities. By the end of 2019, Ritual will operate in over 40 cities\u00a0and triple its total restaurant count.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are proud of the progress we have made in such a short period of time. Because of our solid business fundamentals, we\u2019re now positioned to rapidly scale our business and move into many more markets this year. We are excited to become a truly global brand,\u201d said Ray Reddy, co-Founder and CEO of Ritual. \u201cWe look forward to bringing the ease of use and accessibility to users as well as offer restaurants a streamlined way to service new and repeat customers all while providing the best possible experience for everyone on our platform.\u201d<\/p>\n
“Some of the biggest challenges we faced when expanding internationally was the work involved to ‘internationalize’ our app and business, including accounting for currency differences, language differences and varying privacy laws,” Reddy says. “This was a significant undertaking that almost every team was involved with.”<\/p>\n
Along with the new international cities, Ritual will launch in several new North American locations throughout 2019. This includes Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Montreal and Edmonton in Canada and Portland, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, San Antonio, Austin, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Charlotte, Nashville and Miami in the U.S. Ritual first launched in Canada in Toronto in 2014, and in the U.S. in 2017 with Chicago and Boston.<\/p>\n
“In less than one year, we launched more than 10 cities in North America and we were able to accomplish this because of the strong playbook we have built when launching new cities,” said Reddy. “This gave us the confidence that we could successfully launch internationally in addition to being in more than 40 North American cities by the end of 2019.”<\/p>\n
Ritual will also have a physical presence in each city they operate in, including SYdney and London, in order to manage sales, operations and the in-store experience.<\/p>\n
Ritual provides restaurant\u00a0partners with the technology to enable ordering-ahead and pick-up, tapping into a growing segment of city dwellers that want fast access to food and coffee. It took Ritual more\u00a0than two years to hit one million orders, and now the company processes a million orders every two months. Their\u00a0Piggyback function<\/a>\u00a0enables a customer from one of the Ritual’s 100,000 teams\u2014which are essentially companies signed onto the platform\u2014to combine orders and bring back food or coffee to their coworkers. Ritual also hosts several\u00a0digital food festivals<\/a>\u00a0to enable their customers to explore the food scene of their city.<\/p>\n In mid-2018, Ritual raised a large\u00a0$70 million\u00a0Series C<\/a>\u00a0to fuel international expansion. It was around then as well that Ritual\u00a0partnered with the city of Toronto<\/a>\u00a0to bring more foot traffic to a certain\u00a0neighbourhood that was afflicted by a new transit pilot. That partnership\u00a0worked wonders for both Toronto and Ritual and proved that the order-ahead startup has the capability to influence how consumers interact with their city.<\/p>\n Note: This article has been updated with additional comments from Ray Reddy.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It turns out it’s not just North Americans that appreciate a quick turnaround on their lunch and coffee orders. Ritual has announced a massive new expansion as they head into two brand-new countries, the first time the Toronto company has operated outside of North America. Ritual is now operating in London and Sydney, as well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76244,"featured_media":108421,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[167],"magazine-region":[],"magazine-series":[],"magazine-topic":[],"class_list":["post-108429","magazine","type-magazine","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-News","tag-ritual"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine\/108429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/magazine"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine\/108429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/108421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108429"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-region?post=108429"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-series?post=108429"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=108429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}