Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems.
As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online… → Read More
Dish.fm, the recently relaunched restaurant recommendation app which focuses on the best menu items, as opposed to overall venue reviews, is today rolling out an update which expands the service into more of a dish search engine than local utility. The company had previously allowed you to see the best dishes nearby and compare dishes inside a restaurant, but now the app also helps you find the… → Read More
Fake meats have been around for years, but a new crop of Bay Area startups backed by tech investors think they can make meat substitutes good enough to compete with the real deal. The most ambitious project is Rob Rhinehart‘s cheekily named “Soylent,” an attempt to replace food entirely with a liquid shake that has all the protein, fat, carbohydrates and micronutrients you need. The only… → Read More
Relay Foods, an online grocer which sources its foods from local vendors, has raised $8.25 million in new funding. The company says it will be working with Battery Ventures and TomorrowVentures to beging building out a mobile platform and expanding its team in the months ahead. The capital infusion was raised through a common stock-only sale, the company notes. → Read More
EAT Club, a Palo Alto-based food delivery service launched in fall 2010, has raised $5 million in Series A funding, in a round led by August Capital. Also participating in the round were First Round Capital, Siemer Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Launch Capital, Tekton Ventures, Mark Vadon (Zulily and Blue Nile co-founder) and other angel investors. → Read More
AgLocal, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed marketplace that connects farmers to meat buyers and distributors, is now launching in New York City with 20 celebrity, top-rated and otherwise widely known chefs on board. Currently in a private testing period, AgLocal introduces technology into an ordering system that, to date, has largely operated offline through phone calls, faxes and, yes, sometimes… → Read More
As an inveterate chow hound I like to know if the restaurant I’m about to visit has a) a working bathroom b) PBR c) any health violations. While the first two are deal-breakers – it’s not a dinner without the smooth taste of the Ribb – I’m often very lax when it comes to health violations. Not many others are.
BiteScore is a tiny app that tells you the health rating of a restaurant you visit on… → Read More
About a year ago, Evernote branched out from its core mission of being the place to record your life by launching apps tailored to specific purposes, focusing first on Food and contacts management (Hello). Today, the company is releasing a major update for Food on iOS that will take the app to the next level of usefulness: users will now be able to search recipe archives and look up and map… → Read More
Dish.fm is a new restaurant recommendation mobile application, launching today, which focuses on helping users find the best dishes at their local eateries. Initially, the company had gone the Foodspotting route, debuting an early version of the app this summer which relied on crowd-sourcing techniques to fill its database with photos and reviews. But just a month after the app went live in the… → Read More
Back in August, we introduced you to OrderAhead, a Y Combinator grad and mobile ordering solution that had just raised $2.3 million from Facebook co-founder Adam D’Angelo, Ignition Partners, Matrix Partners, Menlo Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and SV Angel, among others. Today, along with some strong growth trends seen over the last few months, the startup is announcing that it has… → Read More
Fresh Dish, a new food delivery startup incubated by Science and backed by $500,000 in seed funding from Battery Ventures, is today launching its online ordering website, soon to be followed by an iOS application. Unlike restaurant delivery services, Fresh Dish isn’t about ordering ready-to-eat meals from local eateries, but rather ready-to-cook meals which can be prepared in under 30 minutes. → Read More
Foodily, a startup that began as a recipe search site before arriving on iPhone in late 2011, is today rolling out a major revamp of its user interface that puts even more emphasis on social interactions. The company is calling the combination of new features the “Food With Friends” experience, and it’s something that’s clearly been inspired in other trends in the social networking space… → Read More
Chicago-based GrubHub, a startup that lets you order food for delivery or take out online or on mobile, is launching a new “Track Your Grub” set of features as a part of its DeliveryHub driver tracking and order assignment system. DeliveryHub quietly rolled out back in October, and today over 100 restaurants in New York, Chicago, Boston, D.C., Philly and San Francisco, are now displaying the… → Read More
Munchery, the Bay Area startup that lets customers order healthy, high-quality meals from professional chefs, said it raised $3.3 million of an ongoing $4 million in Series A funding in a round led by E.Ventures. Also participating were angel investors (and die-hard users), Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress; Randi Zuckerberg; and El Dorado Ventures’ Tom Peterson. To date, Munchery has raised… → Read More
Just Eat, the multinational online food ordering and delivery company that raised $64 million in April from Vitruvian Partners, Index Ventures, Greylock, and Redpoint, is today announcing its first acquisition out of that cash injection: it is buying SinDelantal, its rival in Spain, to help give a quick boost to that country’s operations and help Just Eat continue its international growth to do… → Read More
Gojee, a design-driven recipe sharing website which has grown its user base to over half a million, is today debuting mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The company, which raised $2.8 million in funding this July, has often been described as “a full-screen Pinterest,” Gojee co-founder Michael LaValle tells us this morning. And now that the company is starting to see traction within… → Read More
Playing in the same general space as 500 Startups-backed Love With Food, but going the traditional e-commerce route instead of the “box of the month” club, new San Francisco-based startup Delicious Karma is officially launching its own artisanal and gourmet food shopping site today. The site currently features over 500 different products from nearly 100 different artisanal food companies and has… → Read More
If you’re anything like me, your mood is directly proportional to the amount of food in your stomach. And when that food is terrific (and maybe even healthy, too), well life is grand. Yet, for a food-centric culture, we don’t give ourselves a lot of options. If you happen to work long hours, often by the time you get around to eating, restaurants are closed — or you’re exhausted and not… → Read More
There are plenty of people who can make great home cooked meals (ex: homemakers) and plenty of people who would probably pay a reasonable price for someone to cook for them (ex: young professionals / bachelors). There’s an opportunity somewhere in there.
Munchery is one of the latest startups to go after it. The company’s tagline is “Reinventing the Personal Chef: Gourmet Delivered to… → Read More
Grubwithus, the social dining network and 2011 Y Combinator grad, announced today that it has secured $5 million in new funding to snack on, led by GRP Partners with contribution from Lebanese entrepreneur Michel Daher, who is best known as the founder of Daher Foods and its Master Chips and Poppins cereal brands, two of the largest consumer packaged goods brands in the MENA region.
The… → Read More
Livebookings, the restaurant booking and marketing service that competes with services like OpenTable, is announcing today that it has picked up another $24 million (£15 million) in funding to continue growing its business in Europe and beyond. The news highlights two trends we’ve seen emerging recently around here: companies dedicated to eating out are not going hungry in the current economic… → Read More
The UK may have just entered a double-dip recession but that doesn’t seem to have trickled down to how consumers are spending money on take-out food — and the companies that are building businesses around that. The UK-based online food ordering site Just-Eat has picked up a third round of funding totaling $64 million, its biggest yet, to further build out its online food ordering service.
The… → Read More
Massive Health, the San Francisco startup that aims to tackle major health care problems with tools such as mobile apps and big data technology, launched its first iPhone app “Eatery” back in November 2011.
For users, the Eatery app is almost deceptively simple: You use it take a photo of what you’re eating, grade it on a scale of “fit to fat,” and give your rating to others’ meals as well. But… → Read More
OLO, a web and mobile online ordering service for restaurants, is celebrating a lot of things: bigger office space in New York’s South St. Seaport district, hitting the 1 million customer milestone, adding new restaurant partners, and plans to launch its long-awaited GrubHub integration, nearly a year in the making. → Read More
Today at the Le Web conference in Paris, Evernote is debuting two new applications for iPhone and iPod touch devices. The first one is called Food, and is designed to help people easily save and ‘relive’ all of their favorite meals and food experiences.
The second app is dubbed Hello and basically wants it easier for users to remember people after meeting them, as well as recording thoughts… → Read More
Mobile dining apps for foodies on the go, LocalEats and BiteHunter, are today announcing a new content-sharing partnership. Starting now, LocalEats’ users looking for a dining deal will see information from BiteHunter’s deals database, while BiteHunter’s users will see a restaurant synopsis provided by LocalEats.
Since both apps are operating in the same space, but are not direct competitors… → Read More
Two years ago New York Times food critic Amanda Hesser and her co-founder Merrill Stubbs launched Food52 to collect and test recipes in an effort to crowdsource a cookbook. It took 52 weeks to research and write the cookbook, but another full year before it was published. By the time they finished their second cookbook (yet to be published), they were convinced there had to be a better way. And… → Read More
Recipe search engine Foodily is arriving on mobile today, with an all-new iPhone application that will allow users to search recipes while on the go, see what recipes their friends have liked and share their own recommendations via photos snapped with the iPhone’s camera.
In addition to the social features, the app provides mobile access to Foodily’s recipe search engine, so you can find the… → Read More
So you want to make fancy food like all them chefs in them fancy Franch restaurants up in the city there? Do you, fancy boy? Well then you’d best get out into the garridge and start building because me and muther aren’t buying you any Sux Vid cooker for $450 so’s you can cook eggs like some fancy Franch cook. When I was in the army we din’t have food processors, just a jackknife and a pail and you… → Read More
I believe I saw something like this a year back that looked like it was created by licking normal sugar cubes and sticking them together, forming tetrads. As fun as that sounds, I’d just as soon have my Tetris pieces fully formed right out of the bag. That’s what this concept from Danil Zdorov aims to do. → Read More
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