Pancheros begins delivery service
Pancheros has expanded their offerings to delivery from Iowa City area restaurants.
Pancheros sits open downtown Iowa City on Monday, Jan. 26, 2015. Pancheros is one of four sponsors for Dance Marathon this year.
December 13, 2018
Hungry Iowa City residents who don’t want to leave their homes now have another food-delivery option.
Pancheros recently announced it would begin delivering food from its Iowa City and Coralville restaurants but only for orders of $15 or more.
Delivery was previously available in many other locales across the country, including other Iowa locations. Pancheros has 70 locations in 14 states from coast to coast, according to its website.
RELATED: CHOMP thrives, despite tough competition
Residents could previously order Pancheros through the website “Bring Me That,” though the delivery company is not always associated with its listed restaurants and instead calls in the orders itself, according to its website.
Pancheros will be delivering its orders independently of other delivery apps, instead using a service called Olo.
Olo is a mobile food-ordering company that provides software for branded companies. Its customers include Chipotle and Jamba Juice.
“Olo began with a simple idea: that nobody should have to waste time waiting in line to get food,” Olo’s mission statement reads. “The restaurant industry’s service model was broken. Why force customers to wait when they could order and pay right from their phone?”
Pancheros is known for pressing its tortillas fresh in-house and using a special tool, called “Bob the Tool,” to mix its burritos before they are rolled.
RELATED: Pancheros celebrates 25 years in the Iowa City community
Pancheros joins delivery apps Chomp, Grubhub, UberEats, and Doordash in food-delivery service to the Iowa City area.
Chomp, the only locally owned delivery app available in Iowa City, has been open for a little over a year. Created by a group of Iowa City restaurants, the company receives up to 350 orders per day for 112 Iowa City area restaurants, said cofounder Adam Weeks.
“Things are going well,” he said. “The market has become very competitive, as a lot of large national delivery services have started to pop up in town, such as GrubHub, and Ubereats, and Doordash. There is also some talk of Postmates coming to town.”
Postmates has not yet begun offering delivery in the Iowa City area.
Weeks also noted that while Chomp may not have the advertising dollars of other, larger delivery companies, it does have the support of local restaurants, unlike other corporations.
“We don’t have the resources that these large businesses do, so it is hard to compete with them in terms of the extent they will go to in order to win market share,” he said. “There is no way we will … have the advertising dollars that a GrubHub or Doordash has, but we continue to win the content battle. We continue to have the best deals and continue to be thoughtful with the advertising dollars that we have.”
The downtown Pancheros location is one of the first two to exist. Opened by Rodney Anderson, the current president of Pancheros, the Clinton Street restaurant has served burritos and whatnot to the local community for 26 years.
Anderson sees the Iowa City location as the cornerstone of the Pancheros brand.
“It all started here,” Anderson said. “This downtown shop is the original and the base of everything.”
