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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chewse

Corporate Catering Service EAT Club Acquires Taro, Launches Zero-Carbon Program

Corporate lunch-delivery service EAT Club announced today it has acquired Bay Area-based meal delivery service Taro. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

EAT Club, who currently serves San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles, bills itself as a “virtual cafeteria” that delivers meals to offices, among them Facebook and Postmates. Workers can log onto the digital menu and choose from sandwiches, salads, wraps, and hot entrees which range between healthy (salmon salad) and hearty (turkey club). One person can input all the orders into EAT Club’s website or app, or invite individual employees to add to an order. Once an order is placed, Eat Club will then notify users when the food has arrived, and where it’s been set up (e.g., the conference room).

EAT Club previously had operations in NYC, too, but suspended those in August of 2018, seemingly due to how saturated the corporate catering space is in that city. Prior to that, the company acquired Farm Hill, another corporate catering service.

Taro, meanwhile, is best known for its “homestyle” Indian, Korean, and Chinese fare that also prioritize healthy, fresh ingredients. The company did a $2.8 million venture round in December of 2017.

For EAT Club, Taro brings its proprietary recipes as well as some new technology to the table with this acquisition. In particular, Taro’s distribution tech attracted EAT Club, though details are few and far between as to what exactly Taro has: “They’ve built some really interesting things we want to keep competitively secret on the equipment side,” EAT Club CEO Doug Leeds told TechCrunch.

As digital tech makes it easier to facilitate, ordering, payment, and delivery of corporate lunches, the number of startups popping up to serve this demand keeps growing. Besides EAT Club, Chewse, also in the Bay Area, recently raised $19 million for its “family-style” meals. ezCater just raised $100 million in a Series D round, and Hungry, which connects companies directly to the chef, raised $1.5 million and services areas like Virginia, Washington D.C., and Maryland.

According to the press release, EAT Club and Taro teams will integrate moving forward.

EAT Club also announced today, via a different press release, a Zero Carbon Initiative to invest in renewable energy and support carbon recapture projects. To do so, EAT Club is teamed up with sustainability consulting firm 3Degrees, with whom it’s building a “custom renewable energy and carbon offset program.” The program will match all of EAT Club’s electricity usage with renewable energy generation. It will also make its packaging recyclable or compostable. Leeds told TechCrunch that the company’s biggest environmental impact thus far is with transportation. Given that Taro has some technology secrets aimed at distribution up its sleeve, it’s possible some of the assets EAT Club just acquired could go towards helping lessen that footprint and find a more eco-friendly way to deliver lunches to the corporate world.

Chewse Raises $19M for Family Style Corporate Catering

Chewse has raised $19 million to expand its corporate catering services, according to TechCrunch, bringing the total amount raised by the startup to more than $30 million.

There are no shortage of corporate catering services, especially in Chewse’s home base in the Bay Area. Chewse says it differentiates itself, however, by providing “family style” meals from local restaurants. Upon closer examination, however, it looks as though they operate just like a lot of other corporate catering services. From the Chewse FAQ:

How will my meal be served?
Your meal will be served family style. This means that it will arrive in large trays that are set up buffet style. Your team will then line up and build their plate by serving themselves from the trays.

I sound like such a pedant, but isn’t family style where you have large platters of food on a table that people pass around to each other? That may be overly nit-picky, but the corporate catering space is cutthroat and anything that can make a startup stand out in the crowded field is important. I called Chewse to see if they can explain the difference between buffet style and family style, and will update this post if/when I hear back.

Chewse’s $30+ million total raised puts it in the upper end of the pack in terms of corporate catering funding totals we’ve been following this year:

This means that Chewse can afford to outspend some of its competition in order to grab market share. Corporate catering is a tough field to be in, especially when you’re just providing food from local restaurants with no additional value add. Employees don’t care which company brought the food — only that it’s free, arrives on time, and there’s enough of it.

We’ve seen consolidation in the corporate catering space this year as EAT Club acquired Farm Hill (and closed its NYC operations), Square acquired Zesty, and Peach laid off 33 percent of its staff. Even Chewse needed to pause its expansion in LA at one point, according to TechCrunch, in order to shore up its business in Silicon Valley.

The corporate catering market is sure to go through more changes in the next year, but Chewse is now in a better position to weather any upheavals, and maybe introduce real family style eating, which, I presume, means having everyone eat in front of the TV.