About the business: Reston’s Frolick is a fresh take on food delivery, offering a rotating menu of chef-prepared meals — delivered for now only in Northern Virginia but soon expanding to D.C. and then, perhaps, well beyond.
How it started: Co-founder Jipy Mohanty has bounced across the startup world for the last decade-plus, from Bengaluru, India, to Berlin to Britain, the Bay Area to Nashville to Miami. At his last job, with Delivery Hero, he noticed a trend amid the pandemic.
“People are exhausted. This was more of a reward, a treat to yourself,” Mohanty said of food delivery. “Then it started to decline — fatigue and guilt, eating too unhealthy. It’s fun, but then you do too much of it, those sorts of feelings start creeping in.”
There was a need for healthy, quality food options, Mohanty said, and a more efficient way of building mass quantities of meals.
“The most efficient way of making food is the most efficient way of making anything, by assembly-lining it,” he said. “Why are we not doing that?”
The pandemic effect: Frolick was born in the summer of 2021 with a big assist from GateGroup, the Swiss-based airline catering giant whose North American headquarters is in Reston. GateGroup, a strategic partner in Frolick, has carved out a portion of its Dulles International Airport commercial kitchen where separate chefs — Frolick isn’t selling airline food, Mohanty emphasized — design the daily menu and the meals to be delivered.
The key is economies of scale, as Frolick can take advantage of GateGroup’s mass purchasing power for ingredients, as well as its kitchen hub.
Brendan Michael Whittington, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a Frolick co-founder and former employee of the company, wrote on that page (the reference has since been removed) that he “successfully raised $2 million in seed capital” for Frolick, while Mohanty said the company is preparing to launch a Series A round this summer.
Mohanty declined to discuss financials ahead of the Series A — most meals cost less than $14, inclusive of delivery fees and taxes. The company isn’t just targeting the direct-to-consumer market, but also companies that want to feed their employees as a perk during a time when worker retention is so important and getting employees back into the office has proven difficult.
“We are the private chef for your company,” Mohanty said.
The challenge today: Staffing up is the main hurdle. Frolick employs seven full time in operations, sales and marketing, and a team of part-time contracted delivery workers. But the talent market for drivers, Mohanty said, is like “nothing I’ve ever seen before.” So the company offers a higher base pay of between $22 and $26 an hour, plus spot bonuses, and has all but done away with tipping to avoid volatility that comes with it.
What’s next: The first step is expanding to D.C. Mohanty said Frolick has secured an industrial space in Northeast where mostly prepared meals from Dulles will be dropped off, finalized in an oven and readied for delivery.
But that’s only the beginning if Mohanty’s plan comes to fruition. GateGroup has 33 kitchens across the U.S., but the grand ambition is to eventually get into 200 cities across the country, to feed 1% of the American population and donate all unused ingredients to food banks.
“I don’t know if I’m over ambitious or under ambitious,” Mohanty said.
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