UpperEat revolutionises business meals

Louise Koefoed realised that restaurants needed to generate more revenue during the week and companies needed to better organise their business lunches. And there she was, ready to solve both problems. As a good entrepreneur, she identified a need, found a solution and launched herself into the market.

The initial idea was much more modest, because it focused only on restaurants. ‘In the beginning, what I was looking for was to find more customers for restaurants, to help the restaurant sector increase its sales during the week.’

But the project evolved because Louise saw that companies also had another pain point, which was finding the right restaurant with the language they usually speak, which is centralisation and simplification.

Thus, UpperEat was born in 2017, the first platform connecting companies and restaurants. It increases weekday sales for the former with corporate customers and organises and centrally invoices all lunches and dinners for the latter. Of course, it needed funding because ‘without lungs, there is no breathing’.

He saw that this concept already existed in the tourism sector, as well as in the taxi sector, so why couldn’t it exist in the restaurant sector? Centralising everything through a single point of contact instead of multiple calls, contacts, different invoices and lots of reports, which ultimately meant that the company couldn’t control all that expenditure.

‘The restaurant sector is very fragmented. You have to make a lot of calls depending on the type of customer and their needs, which are all quite different. It’s not the same to look for a private room for 15 diners as it is to find a restaurant that will send the menu to your office. All this has to be managed, and you have to know where to go at any given time,’ he says.