If there was a way to eliminate child hunger in your city without having to do much, would you do it?
Now, there is, at least for New Yorkers, anyway.
Meet Sharebite, a food delivery platform that joins companies like Grubhub, Seamless, and Eat24, but with a social good aspect. In its current partnership with City Harvest, Sharebite helps feed at least one meal to a child in need for every order placed.
The idea began to form when Sharebite CEO, Mohsin Memon heard that one in four kids suffer from childhood hunger, especially in an affluent city, like New York.
“The thought that we are here in New York City and its happening in our backyard left a yearning desire to somehow take on the issue and find a solution,” explained Memon, who was researching the delivery/takeout sector in New York as a case study for business school.
He realized that the digital take out sector was still in its infancy compared to a lot of other sectors. Comparing it with the airline structure in 1990, when people had just started to book tickets online through sites like Expedia and Priceline, he discovered that only 5-10 percent of an estimated $210 billon dollars market was being used.
While researching the opportunity he saw, Memon was inspired by founder of Tom Shoes, Blake Mycoskie’s book “Find Something That Matters, Start Something That Matters.”
He decided to follow Mycoskie’s advice, create a for profit business model that can create a sustainable solution to a social issue, and combine the two. Memon started the process and partnered with Ahsen Saber, cofounder of Sharebite, and together they launched Sharebite, the only food-ordering platform of its kind to incorporate social good into the very core of its business model.
While New Yorkers place hundreds of thousands of takeout orders daily, one in four children in the city face hunger each day, Memon explained. “If just 1,000 of those orders came through Sharebite each day, New Yorkers could provide one million meals to these children struggling with hunger – all while doing what they already do, doing so at no additional cost and being part of a powerful online community while doing so.”
The company launched a pilot of its app last holiday season, and in that pilot, users helped to provide more than 50,000 meals to children in New York City.
Given that success and the overall demand, Sharebite spent the past year expanding its reach of restaurants and developing a user-friendly transactional web platform to accompany its new apps on IOS and Android mobile devices.
Now, the company has a new mission in mind: a goal of providing one million meals to children facing hunger in New York City in the next year. Additionally, Sharebite looks to further build on its innovative, community-sharing user experience that differentiates it from the crowded takeout and delivery industry.
To kick off it’s mission, Sharebite is increasing the giving to five meals per order placed in the month of December. The company hopes to keep “sharing small bites that can make a big difference.”
The company is looking to expand in other cities by the end of 2017.
