Meet Wes Garrison of Takeout Central

Today we’d like to introduce you to Wes Garrison.

Hi Wes, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Takeout Central is a locally-owned North Carolina Restaurant Delivery Service. After building an online ordering service for our friends at Tarheel Takeout in Chapel Hill, we realized there wasn’t a similar service in Raleigh, so we decided to open Raleigh Takeout in 2004.

In 2006, we bought Tarheel Takeout from those friends, and in 2008, we began serving Durham as Durham Takeout. After a few years of operating 3 separate services, we realized that we could be more effective if we combined our brands and customer service, so we re-branded as Takeout Central in 2012.

We’ve built good relationships with other services in North Carolina and around the country, which helped us buy Takeout Triad in Winston-Salem and Greensboro in 2014, Valet Gourmet (formerly Blue Ridge To Go) in Asheville in 2016, and most recently Surfside Express in Wilmington and 919Dine in Cary and Apex in 2019. Now, we serve North Carolina from the Battleship to Biltmore!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has definitely not been a smooth road! We’ve had to fight against well-funded national competitors; first when OrderUp came to Raleigh in 2013, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, and now with UberEats, GrubHub, and primarily DoorDash, which is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year to put independent companies like us out of business.

We’ve had to downsize and lay off staff, which is always gut-wrenching. Now we’re working hard to remind people that we’re still here, and we have local customer service you can actually call when you need us.

We’ve been impressed with Takeout Central, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Takeout Central is one of the oldest Restaurant Delivery Services in the country, continuously operating in Chapel Hill since 1996. We’re a family business, as co-founders Wes Garrison and Charles Douthitt are brothers-in-law. We deliver food from restaurants that don’t deliver, which was a new idea to people in the late ’90s/early 2000s.

I hope that we’re known for being a homegrown North Carolina delivery service with great people who care about customer service. Of course, we make mistakes, but I’m really proud of the way our team handles them. It’s important to us that you can reach a live person here in North Carolina on the phone when you need us. If something’s wrong with your order or an item is missing, we’ll send a driver back to make it right. We want readers to know that great locally-owned restaurants are the lifeblood of our business. We don’t have many national brands like the big guys.

We call our drivers “Delivery Heroes” because they care about the job they’re doing, and we know that matters to customers. I want readers to know that we need their help. If you value having a local option with local customer service, we need people to order from us instead of the big guys.

So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
What matters to us most is operating an ethical business that we can be proud of. Sure it would be great to be acquired and become millionaires, but we’re happy to run a solid business that employs great people and treats them well.

If we can support our families and contribute to the community, that gives us fulfillment. We think that matters to customers too.

Pricing:

• Deliveries start at $3.49

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.takeoutcentral.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/takeoutcentral_triangle/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deliveryheroes/?ref=pages_you_manage
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Takeout_Central

Image Credits
Camila Calnan and Allison Eding, headshot by Steve Whitsitt