Meal delivery startup Vegetable and Butcher majorly ramps up service area

Chef-prepared, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan- and paleo-friendly meal delivery service Vegetable and Butcher has expanded its delivery area big time. The startup founded by couple Turner Hoff and Ariane Valle, which launched in two D.C. zip codes in October, is now available basically all over the city (and in Pentagon City) — a whopping 16 zip codes.

So what led to the major expansion?

When Technical.ly chatted with Hoff in January the company was struggling to meet delivery demand in just two zip codes — Hoff and Valle were making deliveries themselves. “We’re grown every single week that we’ve been live,” Hoff said at the time.

Now they’ve scaled up capacity. They’ve got extra help in the kitchen, Hoff said, and the company has formed a delivery partnership with From the Farmer. FTF, which makes overnight deliveries of produce in the DMV area, “serves a similar customer,” Hoff said. “So the relationship is a win-win for both of us.”

Here’s an approximate map of the new delivery area:

V+B’s new service area. (Courtesy photo)

V+B decided on the boundaries of the new delivery area by looking at demand, Hoff told Technical.ly in an email. “People who visit our site and input their email and zip also provide us with information we can use to better understand our customers,” he wrote. “If we have 100+ email addresses from one zip code, we should probably consider adding that zip code to our service area.”

But of course that only works within the bounds of what is geographically streamline. “As much as Ariane’s parents want us to deliver to Alexandria (and mine to Houston), we’re not quite there yet…”

The expansion has been gradual, Hoff said, but it’s still remarkable growth in a fairly short period of time. And the idea of partnering for delivery purposes is something new in the D.C. chef-prepared food delivery market — V+B  is charting it’s own path.

Food delivery is certainly far from one-size-fits-all, and it’s interesting to watch different companies tackle growth differently. We hear it’s even more interesting over some gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan- and paleo-friendly delivery.