A new campus food ordering platform is set to offer Texas State students similar services to Tapingo, but with improved delivery benefits.
Grubhub’s partnership follows Texas States’ years-long collaboration with Tapingo, a similar online food service amenity, which was bought by Grubhub in 2018. Grubhub’s acquisition of Tapingo will be available fall 2019, making it possible for Texas State to continuously supply busy students with a food delivery service that maneuvers around busy schedules.
Grubhub’s integration on campus allows students with meal plans the ability to pay for meals using swipes or dining dollars. In addition, there is an added benefit of having the delivery fee waived.
Meals can be delivered to off-campus residents, academic buildings or picked up from the location they were ordered from.
Steven Granados, marketing director of dining services at Texas State, was one of the individuals responsible for coordinating the merger of Grubhub into on-campus meal plans.
“We want to make things more convenient for students,” Granados said. “Having classes stacked one after the other is hard, especially when it’s peak dining hours. So to alleviate that weight and long waiting complications, we thought mobile ordering would be a great idea.”
Grubhub was founded in 2004 as an alternative to in-person and on-paper menu ordering. The company has since grown to a national level with ownership of multiple brands including Seamless, LevelUp, AllMenus, MenuPages and as of 2018, Tapingo. According to its website, Grubhub serves over 400,000 people daily and has over 20 million active customers who use its services.
Yera Ha, Grubhub communications associate, said students who have used Tapingo previously will find Grubhub familiar due to the similarities between the services, but Grubhub offers more delivery options and benefits.
“Because Grubhub is always working to keep fees as low as possible, students are likely to save money by ordering through Grubhub versus other delivery apps,” Ha said. “We encourage students to look out for our emails that often include promo codes.”
Unlike Tapingo, which was unique to the college campus industry, Grubhub is a public company that makes delivery and pickup services available to anyone who signs up through its website. Several Tapingo amenities are similar to those of Grubhub, like the convenience of being able to sync on-campus meal plans with the mobile app, with over 150 campuses nationwide using the company’s technological services.
However, once Tapingo was bought out by Grubhub, it obtained the added benefit of having access to a larger company’s resources and experience. In reference to its recent acquisition, Grubhub issued a press release in 2018 which stated how the platform’s delivery operations, “complement the Tapingo platform and will enable campus dining programs to expand delivery capabilities.”
John Root, director of auxiliary services at Texas State, worked alongside Granados when coordinating the Grubhub partnership. Root said even though there were various differences between Tapingo and Grubhub, the end result will still be the same in regards to making food more accessible to Texas State students.
“Everyone is pressed for time in college,” Root said. “A student might be in a class and not have a lot of spare time, so now they can just take out their phone and put the order in there. All students have to do then is go to the location they ordered from, show the app and get their food.”
Students interested in learning more about the benefits of mobile ordering can go to the Grubhub website or download the app onto their phones.