Today we’d like to introduce you to Kris Schlesser.
Kris, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’ve always been interested in good food as a lifestyle. As a young adult I was hip to the old saying, “you are what you eat,” and I always looked for eateries that used fresh ingredients from local farms. The inspiration to start LuckyBolt came from early in my career when I was working a busy desk job in New York City. I was in finance, chained to a desk all day, and found that it was a challenge to maintain a steady diet of good food.
By “good food”, I mean honest, clean meals crafted with care using fresh ingredients from local farms that practice healthy agriculture. Even in Manhattan at the time it wasn’t all that easy to find good food. Of course, there were plenty of fine dining establishments with impeccable supply chains, but those types of places are of little help when you’re busy and don’t have an unlimited budget.
In my mind, it shouldn’t be a luxury to get this kind of food. It’s what everyone should be eating all the time. I had an idea for a way to make it super easy and affordable for busy people to get good food when they’re busy at work, but I didn’t pursue it. Instead, I moved to San Diego in 2006 and started my entrepreneurial career by building an app that helps surfers answer the question that they face most frequently.
The surf app was successful in many ways, but it didn’t translate to a sustainable business. (We’ll save that story for another day.) The whole time I was working on the surf app, the idea that I’d had for a food delivery concept kept rattling around in my head and the vision kept coming into better focus. Finally, after talking about it for several years, I set out to bring this vision to life and it was then that I first got into the business of feeding people.
In the fall of 2011, I moved from San Diego to San Francisco to launch LuckyBolt. I felt that SF was a better city to test the idea because the downtown district is much more densely populated with offices. I launched a service that enabled people to get lunch from a number of well-known restaurants that were located too far from the downtown area to be viable lunch options. Customers could order lunch from our website by 10:30am and pick it up from one of our couriers at a designated pick-up point in their area. All of our couriers used bicycles with cool trailers to transport the food. We definitely commanded a presence and the service began to take off even with very little marketing. LuckyBolt was getting some buzz.
In 2013, we started to see several new food-delivery services launching in the Bay Area. Most of them had business models that I knew were unsustainable without massive scale and lots of investment capital. I knew the models were unsustainable because I’d already tested them in the earliest phase of launching LuckyBolt and learned the hard way. It’s worth mentioning that to this day, LuckyBolt has never raised any investor capital, which means the business has always had to support itself. Several of the new food-delivery startups that hit the market in 2013 had raised tens of millions of dollars from venture capital investors.
I knew this influx of VC capital was going to fundamentally change the market because these startups were basically giving food away in order to build scale, all paid for by VC money. This was a game that I didn’t want to play. At the same time, I’d come to the realization that I could make LuckyBolt work in cities like San Diego that have more sprawling business enclaves. I had been missing San Diego and at the end of 2013, I moved back here and launched LuckyBolt’s lunch-delivery service in Sorrento Valley.
I’ve always loved San Diego and was really excited to focus LuckyBolt’s mission on making a positive impact here. In the early days getting started in San Diego, we only delivered food from other restaurants and we did a really good job of partnering with the best eateries in town, just like we did in San Francisco. By this point, I had worked closely with dozens of different restaurants and was learning a lot about how the food industry works. One thing had become very clear to me: even the best restaurants didn’t meet my personal ideas when it came to sourcing ingredients locally.
It’s not because restaurant owners are lazy or greedy. It’s because our food distribution system isn’t compatible with small, local farms. Gaining this understanding gave me a strong sense that I’d identified the root cause of the problem, which I always say is the first step towards solving any problem.
In order to fulfill LuckyBolt’s mission of making it easy to get food from local farms, we were going to have to work our way farther up the supply chain and prepare meals ourselves. In the fall of 2015, The LuckyBolt Kitchen began preparing meals in a shared-kitchen. Working in the shared kitchen was extremely challenging. For starters the kitchen didn’t open until 8:00am and all of the food needed to go out for delivery by 11:00am, which meant that every day we had three hours to get all of our equipment out of the storage room, set up our work stations, prep all of our ingredients, cook everything, plate all of the meals, and then label, sort, and pack everything for delivery.
Looking back, I feel a great deal of pride in our team’s ability to pull it all off five days a week. Working in that shared kitchen was tough. It felt like we were in an orphanage. In spite of the challenges of working in that shared kitchen, we built a solid team and everyone was happy. I have to give credit to my mom for leading the charge in getting The LuckyBolt Kitchen started. She is a formally-trained chef and has the golden touch when it comes to preparing food. Building a team around her meant that she set the standard for what we offer to our customers.
During this whole time, we continued offering dishes from other restaurants alongside the dishes that we were preparing in The LuckyBolt Kitchen, so our customers had a choice. Over time we saw more people opting for food from The LuckyBolt Kitchen, instead of the options from third-party restaurants. Our food was winning fans and we were feeling the limits of what we could do in the shared kitchen. We needed our own space.
In 2018, thanks to funding from Mission Driven Finance, we moved into a brand new kitchen that we built in Sorrento Valley. That was a really big deal for us. Having a brick-and-mortar space, designed and built just for LuckyBolt, felt like we’d been validated. For the first time ever LuckyBolt had a physical presence. We had a home. We were established. We were poised for growth.
Over the course of the next two years, we continued to grow our lunch-delivery operation and were feeding busy offices from Carlsbad all the way through Downtown San Diego. On top of that, we had opened two additional brick-and-mortar cafes in underserved office districts and commercial real-estate developers were asking LuckyBolt to operate cafes on their properties. We were scaling rapidly and our focus on feeding people in the workplace was proving successful. We were making big strides toward fulfilling our mission.
In March 2020, when the pandemic forced offices to close, we had no choice but to shutter our entire lunch-delivery operation and close all of our cafes. In an instant everything that I’d worked for nearly a decade to build, the company that I built up from the very first bicycle trailer in San Francisco, it was as if the world no longer had a use for it. I felt like there were two options for me. I could just throw in the towel on LuckyBolt or I could try to reinvent it. I chose the latter. LuckyBolt made its last lunch run to offices on Friday, March 13, 2020. The very next week, we launched a home-delivery service that would mark the beginning of a new chapter for LuckyBolt. Craft Fare was born.
I knew the pandemic was going to be a boon to the “everything delivered” economy, especially to the big food-delivery platforms, like UberEats, DoorDash, Amazon, et al. I had no interest in playing the same game as them. In order to even have a chance competing with those behemoth platforms that enable you to get almost anything in town delivered right to your home, we needed to offer something good. I set out to reshape LuckyBolt’s offering. Instead of the same old office lunch fare, we started preparing family-style meals using ingredients sourced directly from local farms. We even offered fresh produce and staples, like eggs, flour, and milk.
Over this past year, LuckyBolt and I have been very fortunate to connect with a number of very talented local chefs, many of who were out of work due to the pandemic. We started inviting these chefs to our kitchen to collaborate on some of our weekly dinner specials. Working with all of these different individuals, who have all spent decades working in different Michelin-starred restaurants, has taught me a great deal just in the past year. It feels like it has unlocked a whole new aspect of the industry and has elevated the level of culinary craft that we practice in our kitchen, such that LuckyBolt’s offering meets the ideals that I have always strived to uphold since the outset.
This may sound weird, but luckily I had zero experience in the food industry apart from waiting tables at a chain restaurant for one month during the summer after my sophomore year of college. If I had known how tough it is to run an honest food business, I might not have started LuckyBolt. Being an entrepreneur has taught me a lot about business and it’s helped me to learn a lot about myself. I’m an idealist and I love solving problems. Having a clear mission to solve a very complex problem and make a positive impact on our community has played a huge role in keeping LuckyBolt going this long. The mission adds meaning to the hard work that our team does day-in-day-out. It’s the compass that guides us. Also, I don’t accept defeat easily.
If I don’t succeed at something on the first attempt, it just makes me want to work that much harder until I get it right. And when a challenge arises, like a global pandemic for instance, it just adds a new layer of complexity to the problem that I’m trying to solve. If I can wake up everyday and work on cracking a problem and help lots of other people, that keeps my motor going. That’s what has got me to where I am today.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
No, it definitely hasn’t been a smooth road. The implication that there was even a “road” is somewhat dubious. When I started LuckyBolt back in 2011, it was well ahead of the big wave of food delivery services that are all commonplace now. There was no road or path to follow, so we had to blaze a trail for ourselves. On top of that, I had no prior experience in either food or logistics, so I had to rely on my instincts as a problem solver. And on top of that, being an idealist, I made things even harder for both LuckyBolt and myself by making idealistic business decisions.
Growing a food business without any capital is very difficult. There is little margin for error. Growing a mission-driven food business, like LuckyBolt, was extremely challenging and only possible with a lot of personal sacrifice. I bootstrapped LuckyBolt for the first seven years without any investor capital. To be sure, I definitely spent a lot of time working to raise capital for LuckyBolt and had a lot of investors interested in what we were doing, but invariably the investors wanted us to compromise on the one thing that mattered the most to me and the team, which was the quality of the food that we offered to our customers. That was the very heart of our mission. It’s what we were constantly working to improve. Investors would insist that we dumb down the food and service in order to focus all resources on rapid growth. The reality is that my ideals were at odds with being able to scale the business rapidly. I couldn’t wake up every day and be happy knowing that I wasn’t being true to my ideals.
Bootstrapping meant slow progress for LuckyBolt. For example, we had to build our own logistics platform in order to scale the lunch-delivery service. We couldn’t afford to hire a team of programmers. The very first version of our system was built by a team of computer science students at UC Berkeley, who did the project to satisfy course requirements. Luckily, we found a talented programmer in San Diego who believed in our mission and was willing to carry the platform forward in his free time. Before we had proper logistics solutions in place, our team had to do everything the old-fashioned way.
For example, in order to efficiently route each meal to the end customer, we needed to label each meal with the name of the customer, the company where they worked, and the delivery route/driver that services that company. This meant that every day we had to create hundreds of labels by hand. Since we accepted orders up until 10:30 in the morning, we had to complete this task quickly, so that we could then do all the sorting and packing necessary for delivering by lunch time. Mobile label printers cost thousands of dollars and each of our delivery drivers would need one.
We simply couldn’t afford the solutions that were available off the shelf, so we had to be resourceful. After a bit of trial and error, we figured out how to get a small desktop thermal label printer ($120 ea) to communicate with a smartphone using a portable WiFi hotspot ($25), all of which could be powered in your car by an A/C power inverter ($15). I’ll never forget the day all of our delivery drivers were able to print labels automatically. There was much rejoicing.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Working with minimal resources always forced us to be creative and find ways to do more with less.
Resourcefulness is encoded in LuckyBolt’s DNA and it continues to serve us well. In our kitchen we’re constantly improving recipes and finding new ways to use ingredients. Our team celebrates every time we find a way to save time doing a repetitive task or improve the quality of a dish. Each little win makes us that much stronger.
I like to say that bootstrapping is like learning to swim with cinder blocks tied to your hands and feet. You will either drown or you’ll end up being a very strong swimmer.
We’ve been impressed with LuckyBolt, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
LuckyBolt makes everyday food with ingredients that we source directly from local farms; including seasonal produce, pasture-raised chicken and eggs, and regeneratively-raised grass-fed beef. The quality and freshness of our ingredients is really what sets our food apart. We make everything in-house from scratch, including a variety of baked goods, pickles, ferments, and preserves. There are a couple different ways to get food from LuckyBolt. Our weekly meal prep service offers prepared meals and staples that make it easy to feed yourself and your household throughout the week. Delivery is free when your order is $50 or more. We also offer breakfast and lunch at our Kitchen + Takeaway in Sorrento Valley.
We’re always looking for ways to elevate the experience for our customers, so we do a lot of experimenting with different ingredients and techniques in our kitchen. We also do a lot of collaborations, which is always fun and rewarding because we get to learn new techniques and our customers benefit from getting really nice food crafted by chefs who have spent decades training in Michelin-starred kitchens.
There are a couple different ways that people can get food from LuckyBolt. The easiest way is our weekly home delivery service. Each week we post a different menu on LuckyBolt.com that features a different dinner special, as well as a variety of other prepared dishes and bundles that make it easy to feed yourself and your household throughout the week. We also offer breakfast and lunch at our Kitchen + Takeaway in Sorrento Valley.
We’re probably best known for the lunch-delivery service that we started way back in 2011. Unfortunately, the pandemic forced us to shutter our lunch-delivery operation in March 2020 when offices closed and everyone started working from home. Luckily we saw the shutdown coming and immediately launched a home-delivery service.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I love listening to the Good Food podcast from KCRW. It’s part of my Saturday ritual. I wake up early, go get coffee and then cruise the coast checking the surf while listening to that podcast. There’s always lots of cool insights.
Contact Info:
- Email: talk@luckybolt.com
- Website: luckybolt.com
- Instagram: luckybolt
- Facebook: luckyboltsd
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/luckybolt-kitchen-and-takeaway-san-diego-2
Image Credits
Chris Stone
