Point, click and eat

It all started with a tuna hoagie.

After several phone calls to Lee's Hoagie House and repeated busy signals, Michael Saunders finally got through to place his order, only to be hung up on.

That's when the 1998 College graduate thought of a solution to the hassle of ordering food via telephone -- campusfood.com.

The Web site is an online food-ordering system that allows students to view menus, make orders and pay for food from local eateries without ever worrying about a busy signal.

Shortly after the service debuted on Penn's campus in 1997, Saunders, an economics major, boasted about 100 registered users.

Today, the service has over half a million registered users nationwide and averages several thousand orders per week at Penn alone.

"We knew it would be successful because it just made sense," Saunders said.

There are over 30 local restaurants available on the Web site, including the Greek Lady, Allegro Pizza and Lee's Hoagie House.

Although campusfood.com initially served only the Penn community, it has now expanded to 223 colleges and universities across the country.

The business is now headquartered in a 10,000-square-foot office on 19th Street in New York with 34 employees -- a far cry from when Saunders ran the operation from his off-campus apartment on Pine Street.

Saunders initially advertised for the service by handing out flyers on Locust Walk.

After the first two or three years of serving the Penn community exclusively, Saunders decided to branch out.

He introduced the Web site to Emory University, the University of Maryland and Columbia University, where he had friends to spread the word about the service and help jump-start its popularity.

Now, Michigan State University, Carnegie Mellon and Virginia Tech are a few of the universities where the service is most popular.

However, Penn is still the "top contender," Saunders said.

Local restaurants, which give a percentage of their profits to campusfood.com in return for marketing, understand why the idea has taken off.

"It's reliable, and it gives you all the information you need," Ed's Buffalo Wings & Pizza employee Amanda Fina said. "It's quicker than a phone call."

The restaurant, which was one of the first added to the Web site, receives about 75 orders per day from campusfood.com, Fina said.

The websites popularity has also been overwhelming at Izzy and Zoe's, owner Jon Rivkind said.

Izzy and Zoe's makes $6,000 to $7,000 from the 400 to 500 online orders it receives per month.

"On weekends, they're non-stop," said Rivkind.

Because restaurants have no way to control the number of orders coming in at any given time, Rivkind said it can sometimes take up to 45 minutes before the orders can be processed.

Although Izzy and Zoe's initially had problems with the service making mistakes on orders, Rivkind said that the bumps have been smoothed and his business has benefited.

"There are a lot of people on the other side of campus who really wouldn't know us if not for" campusfood.com, said Rivkind, who admitted that he orders food from the Web site as a customer as well.

"It's a great service. I wish it was around when I was in college," he said.

Greek Lady owner Dimitrios Dimopoulos said that although campusfood.com is a good service, his restaurant only receives a small percentage of its orders from the Web.

"I think my business helped campusfood.com more than they helped me," Dimopoulos said, adding that students are more likely to use the Web site if the restaurants they like are on it.

The Greek Lady plans to add a similar online ordering system to its own Web site soon.

Saunders intends to continue adding more restaurants to the Web site. He also hopes to add a new feature that will remember users' favorite orders.

Students remain the main beneficiaries of the service.

"It's pretty easy to specify exactly what you want, and it's pretty fast," said College freshman Jessica Turner, who has used the Web site a couple times to order from Lee's Hoagie House. "I've never had a problem with it."

College freshman Matt Ross, who orders from local chinese restaurant New Number One and the Greek Lady through the site at least once a day, said he likes "the fact that I don't have to go anywhere."

Although the wait can be long, he said that the prices are similar to those at Houston Hall.

Saunders, who can no longer use the service because he does not currently live near a college campus, is nostalgic about the days when he could order from his own site.

"When I was in school, I was a pretty good customer," Saunders said, noting that he used his own creation three to four times per week.

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