Ten years ago, Joe Ariel was living in New York City and had a powerful craving for the hot chicken and biscuits and barbecue that he ate as a student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. So he called up his favorite restaurants and asked them to FedEx the dishes to him. “It was delicious,” says Ariel, who at the time was CEO of delivery.com, “but the magic moment was not just how good the food tasted—it was the emotional power of that moment, of being transported to a different time, a different place, different memories.” With that Proustian epiphany, Goldbelly was born.
Today, Ariel’s company ships food from more than 1,000 restaurants and shops—pizza from Pequod’s in Chicago, cinnamon buns from Knaus Berry Farm in Florida, lobster rolls from McLoons in Maine—across the country, serving up a heavy dose of sentimentality with each bite. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, that hunger for nostalgia, which Ariel says “is the world’s most delicious ingredient,” more than quadrupled Goldbelly’s sales, and last year the company received $100 million in investment. Customers even started using “Goldbelly” as a verb. (Ariel’s reaction to that? “I mean, tears. Tears.”) Ariel also launched a Local Legends Fund to help struggling restaurants, including one of his favorite Nashville spots, Rotier’s, get back on their feet. “These restaurants are not just part of the community,” he says. “They’re part of the culture.”
On what it means to be an entrepreneur:
“At its essence, an entrepreneur is somebody who feels that they can do something better for the world, in whatever their realm is. You have to go in every day and try to be better than you were the day before and ultimately create something. For us, it’s creating a platform to connect customers who would love happiness in their life based on a food experience, and restaurants who would love to have new revenue streams and would love to connect to the people who love them.”
On business being personal:
“We try to elevate shops. We try to tell their story, and everything is personal. There’s not a partner on the site where they don’t know a dozen people in the company, where they don’t visit us—and we visit them. It’s all about the personal relationships, the community, the context, the story, the celebration, the regionality, and ultimately connecting people—connecting people with the foods, the places, the memories, the experiences.”
On the future of restaurants:
“For restaurants [during the pandemic], we created this lifeline, and many have gone on record as saying we’re the thing that kept them in business during this period. The restaurant industry is going to change—it has changed in a big, big way—and I think one of the lasting impacts is this omni-channel future. If you’re a restaurant that is fortunate enough to have a following, to be able to create revenue and connect with customers outside of your neighborhood is a big thing. It’s going to be just a normal thing, as we look five, 10 years out, where every restaurant is on Goldbelly. The vast majority of restaurants we work with are mom-and-pop shops that are just loved tremendously on a local level, and now they can spread their wings and reach customers and share these magical moments and foods with people anywhere across the country. And there’s never a time that you’re going to order on Goldbelly and then not want to go to the restaurant.”
On approaching obstacles head-on:
“One of the areas that I think and read a lot about is stoicism. A first-time CEO or entrepreneur may shy away from obstacles or challenges, but it’s about understanding that the obstacle on your path is actually your path. The point is not to run away from the challenges; it’s to take them on and solve them and recognize that, as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, as a company, your job is to solve problems. There’s this Marcus Aurelius quote from Meditations: ‘The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.’ If I were to speak to anyone that was thinking about starting a company, I’d say that the obstacle is the way.”
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