The subscription case

Restaurant subscription service Table22's Sam Bernstein on support, software, and the power of a good reputation

Contents of a subscription butcher box from Winner in Brooklyn, NY / photo courtesy of Table22

Earlier this month, I asked a lot of questions about subscriptions services at restaurants… because I still have a lot of questions about subscriptions at restaurants. In fact, I asked all of you to weigh in, and the results are more optimistic than I expected: A rough two-thirds of respondents were into joining subscription plans from restaurants. 

You were not, however, into the idea of joining a wait list in order to join a subscription plan like the 4,000 coffee-lovers currently waiting to be let into the one offered by New York-based Blank Street Coffee. Only a quarter of you said you would. Hard agree here.

Funny enough, the National Restaurant Association says that 63 percent of adults say they’d participate in a meal subscription program from a restaurant — so thank you, Expedite subscribers, for mirroring those results almost exactly, over a year since those official findings were released. 

That’s the audience that Sam Bernstein, founder and CEO of nearly four-year-old restaurant subscription startup Table22 is hoping to court. Table22 helps over 500 restaurants and food businesses sell a range of monthly subscriptions — meals, takeout, wine clubs, butcher boxes, cheese selections, and more. And when I say “helps,” I mean “provides technology and software,” but in many cases, direct logistics support, too — Table22 hires and pays the couriers that make deliveries. 

Bernstein’s stated goal, he tells me, was to build what he calls “a customer monetization engine for the hospitality industry.” 

Table 22 founder and CEO Sam Bernstein / courtesy Table22

“That’s a little jargony,” he adds immediately (and correctly), before offering a more palatable translation: “If we could build a model that helps restaurants generate predictable revenue from their best guests and customers — one that helped them meet new use cases in moments in those guests lives, that would be a winning model.” As Bernstein describes it, this is the so-called “customer monetization engine” that’s missing from many restaurants’ tech stacks.

I still have a lot of questions about subscriptions: How do restaurants use them successfully? How might they use them in the future? Will they? And is a small company that supports these subscription services at independent restaurants enough to go up against industry behemoths?

I asked Bernstein these questions and more in a recent interview. Our conversation follows below, and has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Expedite: I can appreciate this idea and your vision. And I love highlighting technology that helps independent restaurants shine. But four years in, what differentiates you from any of the number of huge, well-capitalized restaurant tech companies that could easily build this same functionality into their products?