Portillo's 'subscription' delivers food to any home in U.S.
You can now subscribe to Portillo's.
The famous hot dog chain announced Tuesday the launch of a new Portillo's 365 subscription service, which sends a rotating selection of Portillo's favorite dishes to your house every other month for a year, anywhere in the country. It costs $365, including shipping.
The chain also announced it will start delivering its Portillo's World Famous Chocolate Cake, previously only available in restaurants. It's $49.99, including shipping.
The cake requires assembly, though. The cake layers arrive pre-baked, but recipients need to add the chocolate frosting on their own (a spatula is included).
Portillo's has had a food shipment program for several years but only for individual packages, and never the chocolate cake.
After being bombarded with requests from customers who wanted them to ship the cake, Portillo's spent a year testing different ways to do it, said Nick Scarpino, Portillo's vice president of public relations and marketing.
The assembly option was chosen so customers could have the “experience” of putting the cake together. Portillo's follows a similar procedure with Italian beef sandwiches, or with a tomato that needs slicing with hot dog shipments. And the shipments always include Portillo's paper hats for everyone to put on.
“There's this experience element to our shipped products,” Scarpino said. “People get it when they have family gatherings or parties ... and a lot of Chicagoans like to send it to someone who used to live in Chicago and wants a taste of home.”
Portillo's, which started out of a small trailer in Villa Park in 1963, now has more than 40 locations across several states.