Pizza is one of the great equalizers of American cuisine, even though it’s not really an American dish. From the earliest days of pizza marinara and margherita to the most recent advances of grilled cheese stuffed crust, pizza can be had just about anywhere and to just about any taste. Getting pizza is a little easier now thanks to a new mobile app, Slice.
Slice is geared toward the independent pizzeria, giving these smaller-time shops a chance to better connect with users using an iOS platform. With Slice, users can find local shops, even some that may not be advertising particularly heavily, and place orders with those shops. There’s even a mobile payment portion, allowing users to check out with stored payments or even Apple Pay. Since Slice handles the payments, it doesn’t even matter if this shop is with Apple Pay or not, apparently, as Slice makes the necessary connection.
Slice’s CEO, Ilir Sela, commented “We’ve attracted top talent like investors and executives from Seamless, Plated and SinglePlatform, including Slice’s President Pete Chen, former GM of SinglePlatform. Together we’re focused on fulfilling our mission of enabling any pizza lover in the country to get authentic neighborhood pie through a free app. We already have more locations than Domino’s and we’re just getting started.”
People like pizza, and being able to find pizza—and make it easier to get—no matter where you are is an app worth having on hand. . Plus, it allows pizzerias a way to get in on the mobile payments action without necessarily having to be sufficiently technologically-adept to put these tools in place. In fact, this might be the idea that launches a couple ships in its own right; we’ve already seen something similar to this for bars and nightclubs with Hooch, and now with Slice you can get access to pizzerias. If it threw in a free slice, Slice would basically be the Hooch of pizza. How long until every restaurant from local diners to high-end restaurants has a similar app in play?
We may not have an app for every breed of local eatery, but the idea is one worth considering. Making it easier to find and enjoy restaurants could be all that stands between success and failure for these local businesses.
