Former Comcast designer matches small restaurants to big delivery services and makes 8,000 empanadas a day

The product meetings are intense, with strong talk and laughter for the tech and marketing teams that run the Dominican Food App from a room behind Café Don Pedro in Philadelphia’s Brewerytown section.

For a visitor it’s also distracting. Not just the aroma from the coffee roaster on the other side of the building, but also the teams frying and baking 8,000 savory empanadas — handheld meat and vegetable pies — each day in the meticulous adjoining kitchens.

“By November, it will be 16,000 a day,” founder Victor Tejada vows. Top sellers include Philly-friendly chicken-and-cheese and cheesesteak empanadas. But the menu is much longer: “We are empowering culinary diversity and independent restaurants.”

The app is Tejada’s latest career step. Growing up in the Dominican Republic, he studied art at Altos de Chavon school (affiliated with New York’s Parsons School), where, as he puts it, “Dude, they force you into design classes, too,” giving art careers a tech base.

Design brought Tejada to Philadelphia in 2017 for a job at Comcast. By 2019 he had left Comcast and was driving for Uber, Grubhub, and DoorDash. He was using a company computer to plan not just his daily routes but his own ventures. When the pandemic hit, he set up Delivery Guys, a local service specializing in immigrant-owned restaurants — “cultural marketplaces full of independent restaurants we want to strengthen.”

The business this year morphed into Delivery Guys Apps (DG Apps for short). Dominican Food App, which rolled out in June, is the first of what Tejada envisions as a string including Mexican Food App, Colombian Food App, and more in multiple cities.

With the post-pandemic return to normal, “we saw how broken the restaurant delivery system is,” and how hard it is for small independent restaurants to get consumer attention from apps dominated by high-volume chains, Tejada said.

“And we don’t have all the [delivery and technical] capabilities of DoorDash or Uber, so now we partner with them and focus where we can have the greatest impact and do it more efficiently,” batching orders for empanadas and other high-volume items so they are less expensive to deliver individually and more attractive to the big services.

To deliver in Center City and nearby neighborhoods, Tejada’s teams make their thousands of empanadas and other items to fill orders from the kitchens at Don Pedro’s and call in delivery services to send them in fast batches.

Farther from the kitchen — across much of Philadelphia, and elsewhere in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, the New York area, Delaware, and other states — app customers have their orders filled from a network of hundreds of participating neighborhood restaurants.

”This app is a good thing for us — people love it,” said José Marrero, owner of Caribbean Express Grill on Federal Street in East Camden. “Every 20 minutes I get an order from the app. It adds to my business,” even with the delivery charge, which Tejada says varies with distance but is typically less than the big services.

“I sell rice and beans, quesadillas, and everything on the app’s menu,” said Marrero, a 40-year Camden resident, who also owns the nearby Nightclub Dubai. “They have clients I don’t have. There’s been zero problems.”

Mercedes Abad, who owns the Delicias del Paladar restaurant on Maryland Avenue in Wilmington, said: “We’ve seen a rise in business with the app. I don’t have much space, but I can use these extra take-out orders. Empanadas are Number One for the app users. Also roast chicken, oven-cooked ribs, pepper steak.” She said fish dishes are less likely to turn up on app orders.

“I get 35 to 40 orders from the app, on a good day,” said José Luis Reynoso, who spent years as a chef in Europe before expanding his Alta Cocina food truck into a sit-down restaurant at Fifth and Cumberland Streets in North Philadelphia last year. “Rice and red beans, empanadas, mofongo with chicharrones, they order the full variety.”

Tejada says his goal is to make it less expensive to collect and deliver orders from his own kitchen and those of independent restaurants. “For independent restaurants, the delivery industry is broken,” he said. “Here we have a solution that can scale for them.”

He’s recruiting ambitious home cooks to add products to the menu: “Here we have a food lab. We can run taste tests. If you sell a good cupcake or tamales, we can give you a kitchen to make it. We don’t have to charge you. We put your products in our network” and split the sales income.

Pedro Rodriguez, who runs the coffee business named for him, said the food orders have boosted his take-out coffee sales. He also offers a coffee-counter “delivery drivers’ special”: two empanadas and a drink in a brown bag for $5. “Es lo chulo de esto” — it’s the beauty of this thing — to be able to send coffee and food together, Rodriguez added, laughing.

Tejada says hundreds of businesses have added the app. “We want to work with Cubans, too. We have been hiring some great brand managers,” he said, including Lina Bono, who runs the Dominican brand, and spotlights a restaurant that uses the app every month to spread the word. In August it was Turismo in Allentown.

Independent restaurants welcome the tech support, Tejada added. “We bring them expertise and feedback. A lot of first-time owners are home cooks. They add their special spices that the customer might not want.”

Even many small restaurants now have web addresses, or at least Facebook fan pages. “But it’s tough,” Tejada said. He cited one restaurant owner, who found search-engine optimization consultants far more expensive than he could afford, and contrasted it with familiar seasoning: “‘I don’t use SEO, I use adobo.’ So we become their tech partner.”