It’s been an interesting day for a developing market which seems so utterly niche as to be untrue. There really are startups out there linking recipes to supermarket so you can just buy the food you need to make the dishes. Niche, but potentially quite powerful. Two start-ups announced funding today in the UK. Whisk, a startup produced by a minor UK TV celebrity, has raised £170,000 for a product that has yet to launch, while Foodity has secured over £300,000 seed funding for a platform that’s already being traded on and has customers after bootstrapping for two years.
Foodity produces an e-commerce toolkit for recipe publishers on all platforms that lets consumers buy recipe ingredients at major online grocers in the UK, Europe and the US; plus a data platform and an advertising/analytics module. The startup already has Premier Foods, (the UK’s biggest food manufacturer) as a customer and a number of big grocery retailers, as yet unannounced.
Backing Foodity – founded by Johnathan Agnès – is Hercules Fisherman, a founder of consumer engagement platform Fizzback (sold to Nice Systems six months ago, for $88m); Dr Vishal Talwar, a marketing expert from the LSE; and Themos Kalafatis a data analytics expert. Fisherman also joins to develop the company’s artificial intelligence platform.
Meanwhile, Nick Holzherr, a finalist on the BBC1’s The Apprentice show this year, and co-founder Craig Edmunds secured a £170,000 investment for Whisk from Angels – some tech some not – including Nate Macleitch (chairman of cloud computing company Quickblox); Doug Scott (affiliate ads entrepreneur), Peter Dines and Guy Morris, who part-sold digital marketing business Media Ingenuity.
Whisk interprets recipes, creates a shopping list and then adds that shopping list into the basket of the user’s online supermarket of choice. At first, Whisk will connect to a few select supermarkets and hopefully grow the list of online retailers available.
Whisk allows people browsing for recipes to purchase all ingredients needed for each recipe from their favourite supermarkets, with a click of a button. Whisk interprets recipes, understands what type of ingredients the user would choose for that recipe and connects with online supermarkets to purchase the ingredients automatically. It is free to users and generates revenue by taking a percentage of the online grocery shopping processed. Whisk is currently in development and will be an app, a browser...
foodity is putting in the plumbing between on-line (and off-line) recipe content and online grocery merchants in the UK and US. Foodity works with major FMCG, packaged-grocery and produce brands, and with retailers and publishers. foodity’s technologies make recipe discovery easier and more relevant, promotional recipe content easier to create, curate and publish, and lets users populate on-line supermarket shopping baskets with recipe ingredients in just a couple of clicks.
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