Every year, Syracuse University students order more than 500,000 wings online through one website. Every day, SU students also order more than 950 slices of pizza through the same website: Campusfood.com.

‘If you place each of those slices side by side for the year, it would go from Syracuse to Ithaca,’ said Sloan Gaon, CEO of Campusfood.com and a 1995 SU College of Law graduate.

Gaon visited the Syracuse area Wednesday to promote his company, a website many SU students and others around the nation use to order food.

Campusfood.com is the largest national website for food ordering, as it is used by more than 400 college campuses and more than 200 metropolitan areas, he said.

Since the site was founded at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, it has processed more than 16 million orders, and more than 5,000 restaurants take part nationally in the site, Gaon said.

‘We are not just the largest online food delivery service, we also run the largest menu content site in the world,’ he said. ‘We have over 250,000 menus across the U.S., and every year we get about 250 million page views.’

In Syracuse, 87 restaurants are signed up for the service, Gaon said. When a new restaurant opens in the area, the restaurants contact Campusfood.com. That’s because the website is the source of many orders for restaurants in the Syracuse region, and it also supplies online advertising for the restaurants, he said.

‘We drive people from the Internet to the restaurants. We take hungry stomachs, and we drive them to restaurants who want to feed them,’ Gaon said.

The website receives approximately 20,000 orders per month, and the average customer orders nine times a year, Gaon said.

Gaon said Campusfood.com also supplies loyalty programs, an aspect popular with students at SU, in which they can earn points by playing online games. The points, which convert to online savings, are used to create incentives, Gaon said.

Sabrina Thompson, a sophomore chemical engineering major, said she found out about the website during the first semester of her freshman year and has been using it about once a week ever since.

‘The site is easy to use because all the restaurants are in one spot,’ she said.

Rose Zusinas, a sophomore chemical engineering major, said using the site helps her find restaurants she would not have found on her own.

Zusinas said: ‘If I’m feeling adventurous, I use the site to find something new, but it’s also nice because all my favorites are already there.’

rebarill@syr.edu

Published on April 26, 2011 at 12:00 pm