This Philly-based app compares options across Uber Eats, Caviar, and more to find the quickest, cheapest delivery

Ordering takeout may be the lazy way out of dinner, but it’s not without drawbacks: scrolling through delivery apps and menus, ponying up for fees added in the last screen, waiting for food to arrive. It can be exhausting in its own right.

Availyst, a Philly-based start-up, is tackling one part of this equation with an app that gathers food and drink delivery options from various services into a single feed sorted by either cheapest fees or the fastest delivery times. The feed features results from more than 25 partners large and small, including Uber Eats, Caviar, Shipt, and Boxed, as well as Mercato and Chowbus. That gives it national reach, even though it’s young. (Available in the Apple app store and on Google Play, Availyst is still in beta.) So whether you’re in Upper Darby, Ocean City, or Naples, Fla, you can browse delivery options for takeout, groceries, convenience-store products, or beverages.

The app is the brainchild of Mandy Poston, who has worked in tech and operations for 15 years, most recently as a former senior vice president at GLOBO, another Philly-area start-up specializing in language technology.

Poston, an East Coast-educated Army brat who’s called Philly home since 2011, comes from a food-centric family. Her grandmother was a butcher, an uncle was a chef, and she started waiting tables in high school. She starts her days thinking about food. “Every morning I wake up [asking], ‘What are we going to make for dinner?’” she says. It’s a passion that planted the seed for Availyst, which she conceived of in mid-2020 and officially launched in 2021.

Availyst recently was accepted into Techstars’ Farm to Fork accelerator program, an opportunity that comes with an $120,000 investment and three months of intensive mentorship. The Inquirer spoke to Poston as she and Availyst COO Alec Kissell road-tripped out to Minnesota to participate in the in-person program.

It had been brewing in me on some level for a long time. I love food, but when the pandemic hit, the supply chain was so taxed and workforces were so stressed, this thing that I loved became really frustrating. There was one night we were with our close friends having whiskey by a fire pit, and they were talking about how they’re worried about exposing their new baby to COVID because they couldn’t get grocery delivery, because all the options were so oversubscribed. And we’d struggled with that, too. We tried to get really creative and that’s how I found [local grocery-delivery service] Philly Foodworks. But that very night, we just said, “There’s got to be a better way to get food. Why can’t you see everything that’s available to you and make the choices based on what you care about?” I started to loosely sketch out the idea from there. I tried some no-code tech tools to see if there was anything I could do myself and then engaged a developer and a very talented UX designer to get the idea out. We launched at the start of 2021.

What we call “food search” is broken today. If you just Google what’s around you, you get a paid search with a lot of ads, and those ad budgets are driving the experience. To have a list that’s not influenced by anything yet, that you can start to influence by your own preferences is what we’re looking for. For me, I am a time-based buyer often. I’ll forget to start working on dinner until it’s pretty late, so I’m looking for the fastest option in that moment, and the ability to let that lead my search is a benefit. I also like to gift food to people; I’ll send delivery for occasions, especially if they’re in other cities. Availyst is a seamless way to quickly check what’s around someone.

I won’t go too deep into specifics, but we have a business-to-business relationship with the delivery services. We’re helping to find them customers that really are looking for their products, and there’s a fee for that sort of matchmaking service.

The app works nationally, but we have the biggest footprint in Philadelphia, where we have enterprise like GoPuff and also small independent delivery services like Time to Eat Pennsylvania on the app. We have some presence in L.A., and we’ll be increasing our presence in Minneapolis soon as well. There’s various ways for us to onboard people to the platform, depending on their technology and our technology, but we’ve got fairly seamless methods in place for all of those. So it can be quick onboarding, which is why we’re able to expand so quickly.

» READ MORE: Why aren’t there more local delivery guys? Restaurants discover the challenges of making it work in-house.

We also partner with local restaurants. We had an “App-y Hour” at Triple Bottom Brewing. Essentially anyone who had Availyst already or downloaded it there were welcome to a free drink on us. We’re working on something with other restaurateurs in the area. Our intention is to boost the local business circle through apps of all sizes.

It is a basic search tool for food and beverages today, built with basic capabilities for you to personalize that experience through favorites or custom lists or some general drop-down searches, which for me already saves time. But there’s certainly a lot more we want to do. What we really hope is that people will use it and break it and tell us how to make it better right now. But in version one, which we’re targeting to have out at the end of the year, we’re looking for more precise feed information, to surface even more information for consumers, and offer more specialty search categories. You’ll have the ability to make it even more your own than just categories or tags .

We have more partnerships in place — we’re able to onboard new partners so quickly. We’ll have even more local representation, which we’re excited about. Often smaller independent services have relationships with small restaurants and stores that aren’t on the larger apps, so it gives you a chance to dive even deeper into the neighborhood.

We have strategic partnerships we’re hoping to get in place. We’re really looking to stress-test our growth model in a way that would take longer outside the program, and to have invested but adaptive parties really poke holes in it and shore up areas where we need improvement.

It’s probably dangerous thing to say, but candidly, our hope is very much not to do that. We want the preference of the consumer to be its main driver.