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Two new area restaurants added to Campusfood

May 19, 2011

David LaPratt will do whatever it takes to improve his business — so he set his restaurant up on Campusfood.com, an online food-ordering system for college campuses.

LaPratt, the owner of Samuel Mancino’s Italian Eatery, 401 N. Clippert St., in Lansing, said working with Campusfood.com Inc. has been rather easy.

“I contacted them just knowing that it was probably a good idea,” he said. “It provides more customers to me too, that way.”

Campusfood allows residents who live in designated delivery areas to order food online from a variety of participating local restaurants, according to their web site. Two new restaurants recently have been added to the MSU network — Mancino’s and Papa’s Pizza and BBQ, 1219 E. Grand River Ave.

Carolyn Glass, the vice president of marketing at Campusfood, said the company’s purpose is to connect restaurants with hungry people.

“I think for restaurant owners we can help bring them online — a sort of digital bridge,” Glass said. “And for students, we just make their lives easier and more fun, hopefully.”

LaPratt said he hopes working with Campusfood will improve his sales and reputation. He wants to be more involved with MSU and Lansing Community College students who use the web site.

“I’m just hoping to be able to serve more and more students along with the public,” he said.

Online ordering in general is convenient and provides easy access to restaurants, LaPratt said.

Robert Bashi, the owner of Papa’s Pizza, said he contacted Campusfood himself, looking to build his customer base and maybe get some new customers.

“I liked the site and I really just wanted to be a part of it,” he said.

It’s also a different avenue of advertising, Bashi said. He likes the way the site is set up and how it gives students the opportunity to order online.

“We just started a few days ago and we’ve already had a great start,” he said.

Bashi said he is excited for the fall semester to start and see where things go from there.

Campusfood currently is available to more than 400 college campuses and works with 5,000 restaurants, Glass said. Campusfood has been around since 1997 and the web site gets more than 4 million page views a month.

“We very much have a college mindset in a lot of ways,” she said. “I think we provide a service that is convenient and efficient and rewarding because we have built a system that rewards our customers for ordering frequently.”

Campusfood and Allmenus.com — a sister site which is available to markets other than college towns — often are available to students when they return home for the summer, Glass said.

The amount of restaurants that are added to the websites varies every month.

“In a lot of markets, we just get requests from restaurants,” Glass said. “We also have a sales team that goes in markets and finds restaurants we know audiences are going to like.”

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