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Chef Shuttle Looks to Expand Outside of Central Arkansas

3 min read

Chef Shuttle has grown to cover much of central Arkansas, and now the company plans to expand into surrounding markets.

The top markets on the agenda: northwest Arkansas, Jonesboro and Memphis. The company hopes to be operational in all three markets by the midway point of 2015.

Technically, Chef Shuttle has already expanded across the Mississippi River into Tennessee. The restaurant food delivery company, based in Little Rock, has partnered with a Searcy company to cater pharmaceutical representative lunches in Memphis.

Ryan Herget, president of Chef Shuttle, says the company hopes to begin home deliveries by mid-February.

“We’ve got 32 restaurants in Memphis now, and our goal is to start with over 50,” he said. “We’re not going to start with the entire city, but with select zip codes and expand from there.”

Chef Shuttle won’t be the first delivery company to operate in Memphis on a large-scale, unlike in Little Rock, but Herget actually sees that as a positive.

“Customers [in Memphis] know about this type of service,” Herget said. “They know what we do, and are waiting for us to come into the market. There’s a void from a company that was previously there and went out of business.”

Meanwhile, Chef Shuttle hopes to be in northwest Arkansas by the end of March. The plan is to start in Fayetteville with about 20 restaurants, and expand out to include other markets in the region like Bentonville, Springdale and Rogers. 

Central Arkansas Offerings

It’s been about a year since Herget and two partners — Kyle Crossland and Wes Kirtley — bought Chef Shuttle.

Since then, the company has grown from one that delivered to Little Rock residents from less than 10 restaurants to one delivers from more than 100 restaurants to residents in Alexander, Benton, Bryant, Cabot, Jacksonville, Little Rock, Maumelle, North Little Rock, Roland, Shannon Hills, Conway and Sherwood.

“We saw the bigger vision,” Herget told Arkansas Business in April. “We saw there was a market for it.”

Crossland and Kirtley have now moved on from the company, but Herget said there is a good core team. Looking to the future, Herget said he’s concerned with bolstering the central Arkansas offerings.

“We’re confident with our offerings in Little Rock,” he said. “We want to focus on other areas, and beef those up.”

Herget said he also has aspirations to reach other markets in the state, including Hot Springs.

Not long after Herget purchased the company, he manuevered a partnership with Jason LaFrance, Stephen LaFrance and Dan Andrews. 

“That’s a big part of the reason of why we’ve grown and done what we have over this short period of time,” Herget said. “Having someone who has run a company, knows the problems and being there to guide us in the right direction, it’s one of the reasons why we’ve grown as much as we have.”

Right now the company employs about 100, including drivers, dispatchers and full-time staff. Chef Shuttle is open seven days a week, 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sunday. For more information, check out the website.

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