This post is sponsored by the ClusterTruck. But rest assured, all thoughts and opinions are our own.
Food delivery has a few familiar problems.
Your food arrives cold, an order goes missing, or you spend nearly as much on delivery fees as you did on dinner. ClusterTruck has been serving Columbus for years with a different approach: a delivery-focused kitchen that handles both the cooking and the delivery, with a system designed to get freshly prepared food to your door.
Instead of preparing food at a traditional restaurant and relying on a third-party app to send a driver, ClusterTruck handles both the cooking and delivery itself. The company operates a kitchen designed around online orders, with a system that coordinates when meals are prepared and when drivers arrive to pick them up.
During a recent tour of the Columbus kitchen, Evan Sherrill, ClusterTruck’s director of marketing, explained how the system works. Rather than cooking meals as soon as orders come in, the kitchen coordinates preparation with a driver’s estimated arrival time.
If a burger takes seven minutes to cook, for example, the kitchen aims to start preparing it when a driver is about seven minutes away. The idea is to cut down on the time food spends sitting around before it reaches a customer.
ClusterTruck drivers also make one delivery stop at a time before returning to the kitchen for another order. Customers can track their deliveries online, and the company offers free delivery.
ClusterTruck isn’t exactly a one-trick kitchen.
Its menu includes more than 100 items, spanning everything from pizza and burgers to tacos, wraps, breakfast burritos and pad Thai.
“Everything from pizza to pad Thai and in between, we have on the menu,” Sherrill said.
During the kitchen tour, the team highlighted its house-made sauces, salsa, queso and pizza sauce, along with smoked wings and pork prepared in-house. The menu also includes a rotating selection of specialty items.
A few dishes the team recommended included the Surfer Girl pizza, topped with pineapple and jalapeño and finished with a house-made garlic and basil butter, and the Lazy Breakfast Burrito, which Sherrill described as one of the kitchen’s top sellers.
There’s also a Nashville hot chicken sandwich developed after members of the company’s team traveled to Nashville to work on the recipe. The kitchen’s goal is to offer the variety of a large restaurant menu without relying on a collection of separate restaurant partners.
That variety can be useful for groups with different cravings. Rather than placing orders at multiple restaurants and coordinating separate deliveries, customers can choose from the same menu.
For October, Columbus customers can also order ClusterTruck’s Big Blue-berry and Lemon Cookies. According to the company, $1 from each cookie purchased will go to Nationwide Children’s Foundation, and ClusterTruck will donate a cookie to a nurse at Nationwide Children’s Hospital for each one sold. The limited-time promotion offers a sweet reason to add something extra to your next order while supporting a local healthcare institution.
ClusterTruck’s approach extends beyond the food itself.
Its drivers work as independent contractors, choosing when they want to work and keeping the tips they earn.
The company’s one-stop delivery model is designed to help drivers spend less time on each delivery and return to the kitchen for another order. Drivers don’t have to enter apartment buildings, search for parking or walk orders up to individual units, either.
That flexibility can make the work accessible to people whose schedules or circumstances don’t fit a traditional job. Sherrill described drivers who work around family responsibilities, including parents who bring their children along, and drivers who appreciate being able to complete deliveries without having to leave their vehicles.
ClusterTruck’s founder, Chris Baggott, developed the concept after recognizing how difficult delivery work could be. The company set out to create a better experience for drivers while making the process more efficient for customers.
The model also means drivers aren’t constantly traveling to different restaurants, waiting for orders to be prepared and dealing with separate pickup procedures. Instead, they return to a single kitchen built around the company’s delivery system.
Customer service is another part of that approach. If an order arrives with something missing, customers can report the problem through the company’s website and connect with a real person who can help find a solution, whether that’s sending the missing item or providing a credit.
ClusterTruck’s Columbus delivery area is surprisingly large.
It includes the University District, Upper Arlington, Bexley, Grandview, German Village, and more. Customers can check their address and delivery eligibility through the company’s website.
The company also offers pickup for customers who prefer to collect their orders themselves.
The appeal of something like ClusterTruck is pretty straightforward. You can order dinner for a group with wildly different tastes, skip the delivery fee, and get food from a kitchen that handles the entire process itself. After years in Columbus, ClusterTruck is still betting that a little more coordination behind the scenes can make a noticeable difference at the front door.
