CookUnity has acquired Cookin, an online chef culinary commerce platform based in Toronto, the two companies announced this week. CookUnity, a New York City-based platform that delivers chef-created meals to consumers, will integrate Cookin’s 1,500 creators—ranging from home cooks to restaurant chefs—operating across 40 U.S. states and 10 Canadian provinces into their network of chef creators to power the company’s delivery service.
The deal will also bring Cookin’s SaaS technology to CookUnity’s chefs, providing a turnkey storefront that enables home cooks and chefs to create “Drops”—essentially short-term pop-ups without a big capital investment—as well as sell à la carte meals.
According to Cookin CEO Morley Ivers, the seeds for the deal were planted last summer when he met CookUnity founder and CEO Mateo Marietti.
“We immediately recognized the powerful synergy between our visions and the vast potential of combining our strengths,” wrote Ivers in a post on LinkedIn. “Together, we represent an unparalleled ecosystem that will make the food industry better, forever.”
While Cookin launched with a focus on smaller culinary creators, such as home cooks making meals out of their home kitchens (in this way, it was similar to the now-defunct Josephine or the Cook Alliance, a non-profit that launched last year to act as a marketplace for home cooks to sell meals), CookUnity focuses on chefs looking to launch an online business from their commercial kitchens. CookUnity’s expertise in logistics, ingredient sourcing, packaging, and delivery will bring additional services to the home chef community currently operating on Cookin’s platform.
On the ingredient side, the newly combined entity is launching the Ingredients Club, which will provide home chefs with access to wholesale food supplies. According to Ivers, CookUnity is responsible for spending around $100 million annually on ingredients for its chefs.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Ivers says all 52 Cookin shareholders approved the agreement, giving them equity in CookUnity. According to CookUnity, prior to the deal, they were approaching half a billion dollars in annual revenue and growing at 80% year over year.
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