SkipTheDishes still based in city
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/03/2016 (3519 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Winnipeg’s newest job-generating head-office darling, SkipTheDishes, has not skipped town.
This week, the information-technology company masquerading as a restaurant delivery-service operation caught a few people in Winnipeg off guard when it announced it was going to grow its small, 25-person, Saskatoon office to 300 people over the next three years.
But those jobs will be in addition to the large and growing staff — close to 300 — already hard at work in Winnipeg. (It had 30 Winnipeg employees, not counting drivers, less than two years ago.)
Josh Simair, co-founder and CEO of SkipTheDishes, said the Saskatoon announcement came all of sudden this week because the Saskatchewan government of Brad Wall wanted to be able to announce the subsidies it was doling out to the Winnipeg company before the news blackout preceding the April 4 election in the neighbouring province.
(Simair and his co-founders, brothers Daniel and Chris Simair, Jeff Adamson and Andrew Chau formed the business in Saskatoon in 2013.)
The Saskatoon announcement came as a surprise to some in Manitoba, where the province announced in December it would help the company with training costs to the tune of $5 million.
“Those are net new jobs in Saskatoon. It’s a big expansion,” Simair said. “But Winnipeg continues to grow and we are on target for the growth of the Winnipeg office.”
In December, Simair said the Winnipeg office is expected to get to around 600-plus positions.
Meanwhile, the company has just launched its restaurant meals delivery service in Buffalo, N.Y. and plans to have St. Louis, Mo., fired up next.
It already operates in three cities in Ohio, in addition to a host of Canadian cities including Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver as well as Mississauga and Etobicoke in the Toronto area.
Marshall Ring, the CEO of the Manitoba Technology Accelerator, which has been working with SkipTheDishes since it set up the Winnipeg head office in 2014, said the expansion to Saskatoon was in the works for a while.
“It’s all good,” Ring said. “In fact it’s much better to be doing that kind of move to Saskatoon rather than Toronto.”
That’s because if it moved to Toronto, Ring said it might have been more likely to receive investments from local investors in Canada’s largest city thereby creating the risk that it might move there.
The addition of Buffalo and St, Louis is part of a rapid ramp up the company is undertaking to add about 25 new markets to its service that seamlessly connects customers to their favourite local restaurants and food couriers.
martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca