Our Story

A Mission-Driven Product

As the American restaurant industry adapts to changing Covid landscape, many independent restaurants and food professionals have moved to more informal and agile food businesses to make ends meet, and to help nourish their communities. Minimart was started in March 2020 to support the growing independent food community by providing online menu hosting and order fulfillment services for free. As of December 2020, just nine months later, the platform had grown to almost 200 entrepreneurs and facilitated over $500,000 in sales at no cost to its users. That means savings of almost $15,000 in credit card processing fees, not to mention the 10-30% commission avoided from exploitative delivery/courier services. Like many of the chefs and bakers growing their businesses on Minimart, our work is a labor of love and started as a volunteer project. Our goal is to provide elegant, high quality tools at a low cost for early-stage entrepreneurs. We believe the benefits of web technology shouldn't be reserved for only those already at the top.

The Team

Minimart was created in Los Angeles by Resto founder, Eli Silverman, with support from Savannah de Montesquiou. In addition to building Resto and Minimart, Eli operates a branding and software consultancy that began in New Orleans over ten years ago. Caliper Creative works with independent restaurants designing logos and print materials, creating websites and building custom software.

Special Thanks

Minimart would not exist without the inspiration and support of a number of people and organizations. First, a thanks to Saehee Cho at Soon Food for inspiring this project through the creation of Soon Mini. Thanks to Ben Jeavons for vulnerability testing and security recommendations. And thank you to Drew of Drew Macklin Law for providing legal counsel and helping Minimart support Bakers Against Racism's Holiday Bake Sale in 2020. Lastly, a handful of platforms and services have been very generous and granted extended trials or free usage of their products. Minimart exists because of the help and support from the following companies:
  • Airtable - Spreadsheets on steroids, plus so much more. Airtable is powering both our shops and owner dashboards
  • Netlify - Best-in-class, blazing fast hosting and deployment, specifically for JAM stack and Javascript SPAs
  • FullStory - User session tracking and Analytics
  • SendGrid - Transactional and Marketing Email
  • Loom - Easy-to-use screen recording and hosting for our How-to Vids
  • Cloudinary - Affordable, best-in-class media hosting and delivery
  • Calendly - Schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails