Grubhub Offers Campus Card Payments in Bid for Student Loyalty

Grubhub is tapping new payment solutions to secure the spending of the college student population.

The aggregator announced Monday (March 27) a partnership with Transact Campus, a company that creates digital payment solutions for colleges and universities, to offer the former’s marketplace via the latter’s app.

The partnership enables students to pay for their restaurant meals with their campus cards, as they would pay for tuition, housing or dining hall meals. The integration will go live in the months ahead.

“This integration is a major win for everyone involved and a big step forward to provide a more holistic dining experience for students,” said Geoff Ellis, vice president of strategic partnerships and business development at Grubhub, said in the announcement. “…Campus environments are ripe for innovation, and we’re looking forward to working with Transact to bring even more value to students, administrators and restaurants in communities across the country, while growing our campus and diner network.”

In recent years, following the return of in-person student life, aggregators have been seeking out new partners or in-house offerings to meet the needs of this demographic with convenient, flexible on-campus options.

Grubhub, for its part, has been active at colleges for some time, and back in October, the firm announced it was expanding its robotic delivery offerings on U.S. college campuses in partnership with autonomous delivery services provider Starship Technologies.

Plus, Grubhub is certainly not the only aggregator seeking ways to secure this demographic’s spending now, while they are young, in a bid to create lifelong loyalty. DoorDash, the nation’s leading restaurant aggregator, has been especially active in its efforts to do so. Last year, the company launched a half-priced version of its DashPass membership, offering fee-free delivery for a set monthly or annual rate for students.

Additionally, last month, the aggregator announced a partnership with education technology company Chegg, enabling college students who are subscribed to the latter’s Study Pack program, which includes a range of educational support tools, to get a free DashPass Student membership.

Research from PYMNTS’ study “The ConnectedEconomy™ Monthly Report: Meet the Zillennials,” which drew from responses from nearly 4,000 U.S. consumers, found that younger Generation Z diners are disproportionately ordering from restaurants online. Specifically, 69% of Gen Z diners born after the year 2000 do so, compared to 67% of Zillennials (those born between 1990 and 2000).

These young consumers are slightly less digitally engaged in dining than millennials, but far more so than older generations, with just 54% of Generation X and 30% of baby boomers and seniors making digital purchases from restaurants.

Indeed, aggregators are not the only ones making a play for college students’ disproportionately high demand for digital restaurant options. A couple years ago, for instance, campus food service company Chartwells Higher Education created a ghost kitchen program for students.

“We have found that the success of our ghost kitchen program is directly tied to its flexibility,” Chartwells CEO Lisa McEuen told PYMNTS in an interview at the time. “Many of our campuses are already well-equipped to implement ghost kitchens at a low cost without having to replace any meal concepts or shut down a location … the most successful ghost kitchens are ones that can flex their menus and offerings quickly to adjust to student feedback and needs.”