News

Ritual social ordering app launches nationwide

January 25, 2018

Ritual, a social ordering app that connects users to their favorite local eateries, announced that it has launched nationally in the U.S., according to a press release. Founded in Toronto in 2014, Ritual is now available in urban areas in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Customers can consolidate ordering ahead from all their favorite eateries, including food trucks, in just one app while tapping into their network to make the experience more social and convenient. They will be able to order ahead and pay at their favorite establishments to avoid line and order wait times, and in a way that rewards loyalists with free food. 

Ritual helps merchants compete for local business by connecting customers to eateries in a way that saves them time without incurring an incremental expense for convenience. Much of that user convenience comes from the comprehensive selection of establishments available on Ritual within each neighborhood. 

By leveraging the power of the peer-to-peer network, Ritual elevates the social network effect at the local level, generating incremental value to local establishments. 

"Ritual has been the saving grace of the busy lunch hour at Spotify," Liza Haddad, global creative development manager at Spotify, said in the press release. "It's given our team members the chance to jump on important global calls or reclaim an hour of the day by relying on teammates to pick up lunch on their way. The team members have also been able to discover some personal local favorites as they jump on others' orders, but frankly, the best thing our hard working team finds about Ritual is that it gathers us all for a moment in the name of lunch." 

Ritual's technology built on the Google Cloud Platform is one of the first to use Google BigQuery to serve up personalized foodservice recommendations down to the menu item-level. By combining data from 300 million in-app events, transaction logs, establishment capacity and historic order behavior patterns, Ritual helps merchants serve their customers better with a loyalty program that further rewards frequent users.

Ritual plans to launch in other cities in the coming months.