The new Carmel business contracts with area restaurants to deliver and market their food for business lunches. It is filling a void in a fast-paced, convenience-driven corporate world.

"We don't have any delivery otherwise," Sans said. "Now I'm getting out large, larger orders to the business world."

Greg Pomasl and Jim Loposser started Indy Delivered after researching the market and finding Indianapolis needed a delivery company to specialize in business lunches.

"We looked at Indianapolis as an under-serviced area," said Pomasl, Logansport. "There may be other services that will bring you food, but it may be from one restaurant or food they have cooked themselves."

Indy Delivered's menu of restaurants is growing daily, including small operations like Sans' shop and A2Z Cafe, as well as national chains like T.G.I. Friday's and Quiznos.

The way the service works is simple. Customers can call, fax or place their orders online. A customer service representative calls back to confirm the order, places it with the restaurant and sends a delivery person to make the run.

Most orders arrive within an hour and have a delivery charge of $5.99.

For Courtney Kitchell, that's a small price to pay.

The pharmaceutical sales representative takes lunch to clients three to four times a week. She uses the dining time to educate physicians about products she is selling, and most of those lunches require food for as many as 30 people.

"You can only imagine picking up that much food," said Kitchell, who works as a local rep for King Pharmaceutical based in New Jersey.

Previously, if she had a lunch scheduled for noon, she would start at 11 a.m. making trip after trip into the restaurant to carry out her food. After arriving at the hospital or doctor's office, she would make as many trips inside to set it up.

"Along with getting the food in, you have all your samples, and you have to park so far away," she said.

Kitchell not only uses Indy Delivered for the delivery service, but she also has the company plan her menus.

"I just call and say I have a lunch for 30 people, and they pick out the food, order it and have it there set up when I say it needs to be there," she said.

Indy Delivered allows its customers to order from restaurants that otherwise wouldn't offer delivery. Nationwide, just 6 percent of fine dining restaurants and 17 percent of family and casual restaurants offer delivery, according to Nation's Restaurant News, an industry publication.

Yet consumers crave that convenience. As many as 75 percent of consumers said they would use delivery if it were offered by their favorite restaurants, according to the publication.

When it comes to the workplace, the need for ease becomes even more crucial.

Many offices don't have time to send out a worker to pick up a large delivery. Most workers, when pressed for time, say they skip lunch altogether, according to a survey commissioned by Smoothie King, a New Orleans-based smoothie bar franchise.

Fifty-eight percent have skipped lunch because they don't have time to get it, and 50 percent say they have just 15 minutes to eat lunch.

The trend is driving more services like Indy Delivered to open up shop. In Indianapolis, an online business called 30MinuteMALL.com opened this year, offering delivery on everything from food to clothes to electronics to consumers' homes.

30MinuteMALL also offers restaurant delivery to business settings. Founder Steffen J. Cherry could not be reached for comment about his new competition, but said in a September interview with The Star that he expected similar businesses would crop up.

"There is value for the customer in convenience, and they are willing to pay a little premium," said Patrick Duparcq, with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Chicago.

The delivery concept isn't new.

"When we grew up, we had the milkman, the butchers and bakers who delivered," Duparcq said. "With the new wave of delivery everything, you just have to know your market before you grow too fast."

He advises the most successful place to offer a delivery service is in an area with a high density of young professionals.