Want a meal from Happy Lobster or Pequod’s Pizza or a Chicago restaurant in Chicago? DwellSocial answers the call – Chicago Tribune

Certainly, flowers and handmade cards are the obvious, perhaps even essential, strategies for celebrating Mother’s Day.

But a local startup is helping Chicago-area communities ring in the holiday – or any day – with a little something extra.

This weekend, Chicago-based Do-Rite Donuts, Vanille Patisserie and Bittersweet Pastry Shop will all be offering Mother’s Day specials to Naperville and other suburbs thanks to a small but far-reaching venture known as DwellSocial.

Or maybe you’re longing to try Smoque BBQ, Pequod’s Pizza, or one of those other Chicago places you’ve read about. You can have something from their menu delivered straight to your front door.

Operating from Libertyville to Tinley Park and Arlington Heights, DwellSocial brings Chicago dining experiences to local communities.

It’s a food delivery service similar to DoorDash, UberEats or Grubhub, but with a twist. Orders are placed days in advance with select restaurants and then delivered to customers within a scheduled delivery window. It’s also deliberately local, designed to make places in Chicago that are normally out of the way for suburban customers more accessible from time to time.

So on special days (Mother’s Day, for example), the Do-Rite candied maple bacon donut that mom loves, or the cuisine she’s been dying to try, can be delivered to your front door.

“Ultimately, most people will think of us as a food delivery service,” says DwellSocial founder and CEO Allen Shulman. “But the biggest difference is that we bring them food that they don’t really have access to.”

DwellSocial has been shaking meals across the Chicago metropolitan area for the past four years. The business, as it currently operates, emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, initially as a means to help restaurants get by as the virus upended the food industry.

“We did it … just to help restaurants who were trying to figure out what they were going to do during COVID to stay alive,” Shulman said.

It was adaptive, he added. And not just for restaurants in the Chicago area, but for the company itself.

DwellSocial didn’t start as a meal delivery service. While the execution days started in March 2020, the startup was actually founded in 2017 as a website dealing with home services.

Originally, the company’s focus was still on the Chicago suburbs, but instead of providing communities with easy access to restaurants, DwellSocial instead sought to lower costs for homeowners who needed a contractor – think plumbers, electricians, painters – by bundling local demand for a particular service. and hiring one contractor to complete multiple jobs in one fell swoop.

But then the pandemic disrupted DwellSocial’s home services model.

“Nobody invited contractors into their homes,” Shulman said.

DwellSocial found itself, like the restaurant industry, needing to shift gears. The pair accidentally ended up holding hands.

“We had already created this very efficient platform, albeit for home services, where we were gathering demand for these … communities,” Shulman said. “So we just applied this concept of being efficient to (delivering) food.”

During the height of COVID, DwellSocial initially repurposed its aggregation model to act as a middleman for customers and restaurants offering takeout. Instead of delivering directly to customers’ doors, as is the case now, DwellSocial would arrange local pickup services, where it would pick up meal orders from restaurants, take them to a communal parking lot and distribute them to customers there – the total ask for takeout, if you want, Shulman said.

However, over time, DwellSocial developed home delivery.

Because DwellSocial is not an on-demand service, the startup arranges deliveries through ‘events’. These essentially indicate when various Chicago eateries will be available for delivery through DwellSocial in various suburbs.

Last month, for example, DwellSocial hosted an “event” that brought Pequod’s Pizza — recently named the best pizzeria in the country by Yelp — to Naperville for a day.

Shulman said DwellSocial has between 30 and 40 Chicago restaurants available on its platform at any given time, all of which rotate through the suburbs.

DwellSocial publicizes local restaurant events through social media and sites like Patch. If a holiday is coming up, events are often planned around it. But they are not always holiday based. In total, DwellSocial hosts about 200 to 300 events per month among all the suburbs it serves, Shulman said.

Speaking to the DwellSocial question in Naperville, Shulman said Pequod’s is especially popular. He noted that Naperville is “an interesting community” because there is already a large selection of local restaurants to choose from. But the appeal of DwellSocial, he said, is that “it just gives (people) more variety. Multiple choice.”

For a list of DwellSocial events coming to Naperville this month, visit wonen.social/4dwHkSC. This weekend, a Mother’s Day brunch courtesy of Bittersweet Pastry Shop will be available for delivery in Naperville on Saturday, followed by Do-Rite Donuts on Sunday.

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