These Brand Consultants Turned Nights on the Town Into Market Data

In 2013, Christopher Krietchman was walking down the street in Manhattan, worrying about his flailing meal-delivery company. Krietchman was the founder of Fresh Grill Café, which cooked and delivered healthy meals to New Yorkers. When he launched in 2008, online food delivery barely existed. These were the days of first-generation iPhones, back when Groupon could make you a success. “We had customers in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and New Jersey,” he says now. But slowly -- and then seemingly all at once -- everything changed. Groupon imploded as the market flooded with meal-delivery services like Seamless and Blue Apron, all of them with better technology, fresher branding, and more efficient order fulfillment than Fresh Grill Café.

Pieter Henket

Krietchman had been an industry pioneer, but he’d failed without a solid business plan and vision. Now the industry had no place for him. He wasn’t ready to give up on his company, but he didn’t know how to fix it.