http://napkin.co.uk AKA Naphin.com offers something new in Take Away

Napkin.com | Take Away Food Will Never Be The Same Again

Napkin.com launched in the UK in 2007 and is an internet food and drink portal that has developed an internet “takeaway” business. Founded by a former strategic consulting partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers and his son, Napkin provides an online interface to help individual and corporate customers secure internet access to food and drink from all levels of the restaurant market. The proposition (now being promoted in the UK) will be rolled out globally from 2010.

What we do

Napkin is one of the cuter online sites and intends to extend the traditional concept of the takeaway to permit even fine dining restaurants to offer suitable dishes to the market. Why shouldn’t it be possible to have a great chef prepare a fabulous dessert for a private dinner party or special celebration? Wouldn’t it be useful if that superb restaurant wine list were a little more accessible when the off-licence was closed. Napkin even hires the conveyor belts used by Yo Sushi through our site to help whisk the food around a large area or a marquee for a private party! We can only dream of The Fat Duck selling a portion of its products online but there is no reason why they shouldn’t. (Having said that we should probably approach Heston Blumenthal to see if he would be interested given his uniquely innovative role around food).

On Napkin.com, our restaurants (we call them Napkins), can establish a profile of their menu and upload pictures of their logos/staff/restaurant and food. This gives them a little more personality than a straightforward listing or a reference to their menu. They are also able to display lengthy text to describe their uniqueness or descriptors of their food. I suppose it’s a kind of “Facebook” for restaurants.

In providing a service whereby orders can be placed both quickly and efficiently Napkin signals the end of lengthy phone calls or the need to explain to customers the details of their menu. Napkin is already acquiring customers who have not traditionally offered a takeaway service but now see our portal as a means of so doing. (We have just signed up the Made In Iatly and Biagio groups) Perhaps even more significantly, in the difficult trading conditions that lie ahead some restaurants are able to expand their identities online and offer several types of cuisine from the same kitchen and are only limited by the talents of their chefs. The virtual restaurant has arrived…….we are already aware of several market makers who intend to capitalize on their quality food brands and utilize our online trading portal to offer product to market with ease and speed. We feel sad for the smaller restaurants who have sometimes invested quite significant monies in developing their own static on-line identity and yet they still lack a trading capability.

Napkin charges only a trivial annual subscription to set up a new food/drink outlet. For the price of a tank of petrol any restaurant in the UK can have a fully functional, trading website to help boost their volumes and capture incremental trade!

One of the most potent aspects of the website is that restaurateurs have full control panel access over their menu and pricing; this allows them to manage their throughput and load in a way that is sensitive to their commercial pressures at any given point in the week or time of year. With the fast changing price of rice….expensive reprints of takeaway menus to be discarded by householders is a thing of the past.

Napkin is signing even leading players who have their own online websites such as Yo! Sushi and Firezza, the fastest growing pizza chain in the UK. We see no conflict between the various channels to market that the modern consumer demands. Customer retention is going to be a key critical success factor in 2009 for everybody in the restaurant industry. The fact that the customer’s behaviour will not be linear is simply something we have to comprehend and manage.

Let’s talk about Text baby

Napkin.com intends to develop and utilize the full suite of mobile technology to allow customers maximum ease of use when ordering “at a click”. Napkin has secured 627546.com to allow that possibility. There may well be a scramble for some famous domain names in numbers …..
Napkin has established an early link up with TopTable. Not all our customers will always be ordering a takeaway and hence for those moments when “dining-in” is the right answer we have established a link-up with TopTable to allow our users to also book a restaurant on-line.

Napkin is a gold partner of the London Tourist Board

In order to support the London economy and ensure that all visitors get access to great food napkin has formed a partnership with the London tourist board to help promote all our restaurants and give them maximum publicity. With the Olympics coming how could we not?
Napkin.com offers takeaway discounts to all NHS staff across London

Napkin.com, has lifted a little of the recessionary gloom by arranging that an array of London hospital staff can benefit by securing a 15% “Red Cross” discount. The discount is available for some 9500 NHS medical staff spread across the largest NHS trust in the UK (Imperial College Healthcare). The participating restaurants (Napkins) who make this offer possible see this as a way of saying thank you to some of those who are not well rewarded or recognised for the enormous public service they provide. Our thanks go to Hazel Melnick for making this happen.
Napkin intends to extend this concept to both Licensed Taxi drivers and NUS members from January 2009 and is presently in discussions to determine what level of discounts might be supportable by our restaurateurs.

Corporate account holders

Napkin can also help large, dispersed organizations or companies who are keen to exert greater cost control over how diverse employee populations spend on casual catering. Napkin can give these relationships greater visibility and hence structure the supplier relationships appropriately.
Most large companies could save over 20% of their catering costs simply by having an account and exerting some stewardship over employee choices. Not a popular choice but in the current climate a necessary one.

Fresh, funky & edgy

We are very lucky to have the support of an exciting up and coming fashion photographer Kate Bellm – www.katebellm.com – who is helping us to identify some unique imagery that we feel will become iconic in the restaurant trade. This imagery will be released during 2009 as we engage with different market sectors. This is how students eat pizza….© Kate Bellm

Survival of the fittest

Already we have seen some of our restaurants lose 30-50% of their in-house volume in the few weeks run up to Christmas 2008. This loss is likely to be sustained in 2009 and needs to be supplemented by an effective, tailored and targeted online solution. Our favourite story is of the restaurateur who has on his menu “Graham’s surpise”…..each Friday Graham calls in for a curry and is given a bag. The contents of this bag is known only to the restaurateur….using Napkin.com Graham now feels very special in that his dish can be added as a menu item. Graham is a market of one, as are we all. We like Graham and hope he stays in the Napkin fold and keeps clicking in 2009.

http://napkin.co.uk