Pop-Up Restaurant Delivers Hot Sandwiches By Parachute
What to do when you live on the 7th floor of an apartment building, but feel the desperate need to start a pop-up restaurant in your own house? That was what the people behind the Australian pop-up concept Jafflechutes must have experienced before they came up with the idea to serve hot sandwiches by means of a parachute.
‘Jaffle’ is the Australian word to describe sandwich toaster. Jafflechutes is a combination of Jaffles and parachutes. Customers of the pop-up restaurant order and pay via PayPal, and wait at a designated spot that’s marked with an ‘X’ to pick-up their sandwich, which comes floating down from the 7th floor. The ‘Drop it Like it’s Hot’ sandwich with ham or cheese and tomato costs 5 AUD, while a ham and cheese and tomato sandwich, named ‘Gust of Wind’ costs 6 AUD.
Founders David McDonald and Adam Grant started Jafflechutes not as a joke, but as a new way to serve hungry urbanites in high density urban cores. And although the concept looks quite funny, the idea of an airborne sandwich bar is not that strange. Smartphone-supported payment systems make serving food accessible for all, even for people living on the 7th floor of an apartment building.
Using gravity to do the serving is relatively cheap compared to hiring a staff of waiters. Also from a real estate point-of-view this idea has potential. Retail spaces are often very expensive on street level, and the prices logically drop when you’re higher up in the building.