FoodBall is an aggregator of food orders for long-distance trains. It has been operating for only a year but has become a strong competitor to the traditional dining cars of the Russian Railways. FoodBall has got about 500 partners including Subway fastfood restaurant chain, and hundreds of cafes and restaurants in 74 Russian cities located along the railroads. It is noteworthy the founder of the business lives in Omsk, far away from capital cities. Kirill Flutkov explained how he got the idea of the innovative product and how it was implemented.
Kirill Flutkov was a regional manager at a law firm and made regular business trips to various cities in Siberia. He spent plenty of time in trains and realized that at the stations food could only be bought from private merchants. Yet he did not want to risk his health. The dining cars food is meanwhile known to be quite tasteless and expensive, and there is nothing like pizza or sushi on their menu.
“I tried ordering food, navigated Internet for establishments located close to railway stations and requested their food to be delivered to my train when it stops. I then thought that if I have a need like that, then every other train passenger does. And there are 100 milion passengers a year”, Flutkov says.
He got some partners, Mikhail Chekmarev and Vladislav Kolesnikov. All startup founders had never been involved with the IT industry, so all technical responsibilities of building a website and mobile applications were to be taken care of by a hired team of developers from Arkell. Later, FoodBall hired its own IT specialist.
The aggregator’s first version was launched in autumn 2017, and its name was chosen because of the oncoming 2018 football championship. At the initial stage, RUR 10 mio was invested. Of that amount, RUR 1.5 mio was spent on developing and improving software. During the time of active advertizing and establishing partnerships, there were up to 15 employees in FoodBall’s Omsk office, such as copyrighters, marketing and contract-making specialists, etc.
FoodBall has not got cooks of its own. Food is cooked and delivered to train stations by restaurants, cafes and supermarkets FoodBall has contracts with. One of the major partners is Subway fastfood chain. In some cities food may be ordered (through the service) from Burger King, KFC and McDonalds. In Nizhny Novgorod FoodBall signed an agreement with Testoria (Ossetian pies delivery), in Yekaterinburg with BAR BQ, in Chelyabinsk with Fly Pizza, in Krasnodar Territory with Rice-Noodles Japanese and Chinese food chain.
“A client places an order which is automatically passed onto a restaurant. The restaurant then transfers us the money”, Kirill Flutkov explains.
For food to be delivered to trains, a client is to type in the name of the station and the time of arrival. The system displays the stations where a service can be received while en route, since the service is only available at the stations where a train stops for over 15 minutes.
The main functions are computerized so at the moment the project requires no additional investments. The staff is three to five people. The company does not actively look for any new partners, yet new requests for joining the system are received on a regular basis.
By Christina Firsova