Bicycle-based restaurant delivery service Griffin Delivery has new owners and a new moniker: The Bike Waiter. Shane Broussard and Heather Monroe took the reins of the 3-year-old company from founder Andy Heaslet Sept. 1, as reported by Kavita Kumar of the Post-Dispatch.
Heaslet has known Broussard and Monroe for two years, after discovering they owned a similar company, The Bike Waiter in San Antonio, Texas. When Heaslet was offered a position promoting alternative transportation at Washington University, he said Broussard and Monroe were eager to extend their brand to St. Louis. “We were using the same service and had very similar business models,” he said. “I knew he could come in with a solid game plan in St. Louis, and he could fulfill all the goals that I had about Griffin.”
Those goals – to increase bike visibility, to create more viable income and to help local restaurants – are already being realized. Heaslet said The Bike Waiter has expanded its hours and its service area, now delivering to areas like The Hill, Lafayette Square, the Central West End and more. Cyclists now use bike trailers so that they can haul more food from more restaurants to hungry customers. Delivery fees also have been lowered to roughly $3.
Though he is now fully entrenched at Wash. U., Heaslet will continue to assist the new owners in an advisory capacity for the next 18 months. Heaslet admits it’s been an emotional transition, and changing the Griffin name was a difficult pill to swallow at first. “I imagine this is the sending-the-kids-off-to-school feeling,” he said. “It’s been a lot of me telling my ego to be quiet and do the right thing … There might be a few things that he does slightly differently … My big goals will be achieved at a really high rate.”
The former mascot hasn’t completely been scrubbed from The Bike Waiter; the griffin still makes an appearance on the business cards. “[Broussard and Monroe] told me they want to keep the griffin involved and pay homage to what we created.”
-Photo by Laura Miller
This article appears in September 2013.