PickEasy started as a student venture at the University of Toronto Scarborough and grew into a real partnership with community restaurants, which is where I learned that technology built with empathy beats technology built on assumptions.
As covered by U of T Scarborough's Department of Management, our team received the Lo Family Grant to partner with Scarborough community restaurants.
Order from a small restaurant through a third-party app and you rarely think about how much of your payment reaches the kitchen. When I started researching this in 2019, the answer stopped me cold: some platforms took 30% commissions. For a family-run restaurant on thin margins, 30% is the line between staying open and closing. That frustration became PickEasy.
The problem we saw
Scarborough's restaurant scene is something else, dozens of cuisines run by immigrant families who carried their recipes across oceans. The food was incredible and the customers were loyal, but these owners lacked the digital tools that larger chains take for granted. Four problems came up again and again. The delivery platforms charged predatory commissions of 25-35% per order. Most restaurants had no online presence beyond a Facebook page or a Google Maps listing. Changing a price or a menu item meant calling the platform and waiting. And the platforms owned the customer relationship outright, so the restaurant never saw its own data.
What we built
We designed PickEasy as the opposite of the platforms squeezing these businesses. Instead of a percentage cut, we charged a flat monthly fee a small restaurant could budget for. Owners could update items and prices from their phone in under a minute, which I tested with three owners who had never touched a CMS. The restaurant kept its own customer data rather than handing it to us. And onboarding came in multiple languages with in-person setup visits, because the people we were serving deserved that.
The grant made the difference
The Lo Family Grant was more than funding. It was permission to build for impact instead of profit, and that permission shaped everything. We spent the first month listening rather than building, visiting 15 restaurants, sitting in their kitchens, watching the lunch rush, and asking questions. We built the features they asked for instead of the ones we assumed they needed. And we measured ourselves by whether the restaurant owners were happy, not by user-growth charts.
"The students from U of T did not come with a product and tell us to use it. They came with questions and built something we actually wanted." (Restaurant owner, Scarborough)
What I learned that still shapes my work
Working with Scarborough's restaurant community left me with four lessons I carry into every project at Space & Story. The first is to listen before you build: the owners understood their own problems far better than we did, and our job was to translate that knowledge into software, not to drop Silicon Valley patterns onto a Scarborough kitchen. The second is that community is a network of real obligations, not a marketing word, and when you build for one you answer to it. The third is that grants tend to produce better products, because removing commercial pressure lets you optimize for the user instead of the investor. The fourth is that small-scale technology can still change a business: we did not need machine learning or a blockchain, just an ordering page that loaded fast on an old phone.
The outcomes
Over the grant period:
- 8 restaurants fully onboarded with digital ordering.
- Average commission savings of $1,200/month per restaurant versus major platforms.
- 94% owner satisfaction in our end-of-project survey.
- 3 restaurants reported their first-ever online orders from new customers.
This is why our consulting work always starts with understanding the community a business serves. Technology is only as good as the relationships it supports.