Online restaurant ups the game in city food business

PeeCees Takeout proprietor John Nderitu. Photo/Diana Ngila

By Sandra Chao

IN SUMMARY
PeeCees Takeout thrives on quick lunch orders by Nairobi’s busy professionals.

When you want to have lunch in Nairobi you think of a restaurant with good ambience, quality affordable food and a perfect setting for good company.

But more often than not the hustle of finding a non-crowded eatery with affordable decent meals during busy lunch hours is difficult. The next best option is to get into the cheapest joint and have something to hold your stomach for the next few hours.

Having had such an experience more than once, John Nderitu decided to find a solution for this growing problem among working professionals with PeeCees Takeout where the meals are authentically Kenyan.

“Visualise a restaurant that does not exist physically but is somewhere you like. You can go there, pick what you like visually and have it brought to you when you want it,” he says of his startup.

What the restaurant lacks in physical space it compensates for in the quality of food and service.

“Essentially what I have tried to do is to take the best practices from other industries and try to integrate it into the takeout business. Technology has brought Internet at your fingertips, your office on your mobile devices and now we are bringing you food,” he says.

The catchy name PeeCees is derived from the initials of his son’s name.

Innovative

Mr Nderitu defines himself as an entrepreneur with a conventional concept who is always full of innovative ideas and finding various platforms through which he can implement them.

He ventured into the hospitality industry albeit virtually even without having any professional training in it.

“In my 19 years in the technology industry I have sold software, hardware, Internet solutions, business ideas and concepts as well as other solutions and of all these, the most interesting have been the simplest ideas that provide solutions to the small problems that we face,” he explains about his drive to venture into the virtual restaurant.

Like many entrepreneurs whose light bulb moments are articulated in autobiographies and other leadership books, his eureka moment came in 2011.

He incorporated what he loved doing — IT — into increasing productivity of workers, allowing them to stay healthy while getting value for their money when it comes to food.

“Seeing a senior level manager walking through the office with a flask of food does not conjure up good memories. It reminds you of childhood days when our moms would stuff food in the school bag and remind us not to forget the lunch box at school when coming home,” he says.

Unlike other platforms online where middlemen link food producers to consumers, often listing meals for various restaurants, PeeCees makes its own food and delivers on validated online orders.