KptnCook, a Berlin-based shoppable recipe startup, today announced that it has received a “seven figure” investment from Miele Venture Capital, a subsidiary of Miele Group, the appliance making giant (and fellow German company). The investment is in US dollars and is the first round of venture funding for KptnCook.
As we wrote back in January, KptnCook is different from other startups in the shoppable recipe space:
KptnCook provides daily recipes to your phone, bundles together a shopping based on those ingredients, and using your location, points you to a nearby store where you can get all the ingredients.
But KptnCook bucks the recipe app trends in two ways. First, while it creates shoppable recipes, it sends you to real world stores to actually roam the aisles and make your purchases. You can’t order online, and there is no in-store order fulfillment.
Miele seems to be assembling the parts necessary to capture more of the European consumer meal journey. Miele itself makes kitchen appliances, including the new high-end Dialog oven, which uses radio frequency solid state technology for extreme precision cooking. Then last month, Miele announced it had invested in MChef (another German startup) to launch a specialized food delivery service for Dialog oven users. Dialog’s technology allows it to cook multiple MChef meals at once.
As with the MChef deal, there aren’t a lot of details as to how KptnCook will be integrated into any Miele offering. But there doesn’t need to be a ton of integration for Miele to realize value out of this investment.
By investing in KptnCook, Miele gains data and valuable insight into the specific recipes that consumers choose, how often they shop, where they shop, the ingredients they buy, etc.. At the very least, this data could inform what type of meals MChef should create for Dialog customers. Further down, these shopping insights could set Miele up for a more direct version of shoppable recipes complete with online grocery ordering and delivery (right now, KptnCook says that just 1 percent of Germans shop for groceries online).
KptnCook wouldn’t provide any stats around its app usage, which leads me to believe it’s not that high. An investment from Miele could provide a nice marketing boost via the appliance maker’s existing sales channel. For its part, KptnCook said it would use the investment money to build out its marketing and product teams, and double its headcount to 20 people.
Elsewhere in KptnCook’s world, Co-Founders Eva Hoefer and Alex Reeg told me that their app now works with Alexa. Once enabled the Amazon voice assistant will walk users through making recipes step-by-step.
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