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city pantry

July 19, 2019

Tech-centric Meal Kit Company Gousto Raises £30M in Fresh Funds

London, UK-based meal kit company Gousto announced this week it has raised a £30 million ($37.6 million USD) Series F funding round led by UK private equity investment firm Perwyn, with participation from existing investors BGF Ventures, MMC Ventures, Canaccord Genuity, and Unilever Ventures. The round also includes investment from British Instagram star Joe Wicks, better known as The Body Coach. This round brings Gousto’s total funding to $137.7 million.

Gousto’s meal kits — or “recipe boxes,” as they’re called in the UK — focus on healthy ingredients and more sustainable eating habits (hence Joe Wicks’ involvement). The service offers subscription plans for everything from vegetarian and plant-based diets to boxes for those who just want a healthier take on standard comfort foods. Users sign up via the app or website, choose a plan, and get pre-portioned ingredients delivered to their door with corresponding recipes each week. The company claims to be delivering 1.5 million meals per month in the UK. Price-wise, the service is actually a little cheaper than its main UK competitor HelloFresh: a four-person box with four recipes per week breaks down to £2.98 per serving, compared to £3.44 per serving from HelloFresh.

The company is also intensely focused on using tech to make meal kit logistics more efficient and also offer customers more choice. The company uses a public-facing, AI-powered personalization tool to make more relevant recommendations to individual customers. “We have been using the technology since our founding, and it powers everything from the recipes that customers see on our website to how boxes are prepared in our Picking Hub,” company CEO, Timo Boldt, wrote in a blog post last year. He also claimed, in a separate interview, that that 40 percent of the meals Gousto sells are recommended by AI. The company also uses AI on its back end, to automate the supply chain, as well as a forecasting.

Sustainability is the company’s other major focus area. On its website the company says most of its packaging is fully recyclable, and that it is looking for more sustainable ways to replace the few plastics it uses in the subscription boxes. That’s particularly important in the UK, where new controls are being introduced in an effort to drastically cut down on single-use plastics.

Unlike other meal kit companies, Gousto won’t head to the grocery aisle any time soon. Last year, HelloFresh started selling meal kits in grocery stores in addition to offering a subscription business. But Boldt has been vocal about his desire for Gousto to be an alternative to the grocery store, rather than another piece of its inventory.

Gousto told AgFunder this latest investment round will go towards further building out its technology side of the business, including hiring over 100 tech employees by 2020.

July 12, 2019

Just Eat Acquires UK Corporate Catering Marketplace City Pantry

London-based digital food delivery and takeout marketplace Just Eat announced today it has acquired B2B catering marketplace City Pantry, also based in London, for an initial cash consideration of £16 million (~ $18 million USD).

According to a Just Eat press release, the initial cash consideration was paid using existing resources, and further cash consideration could be payable if “certain operational and financial criteria” are met over the next three years.

City Pantry’s digital marketplace connects chefs and restaurants to corporate offices to provide food delivery to employees. Its services include not just food for events or large team meetings but also a regular meal planning tool, where offices can order breakfast and lunch regularly and ahead of time. All orders are done online and delivered to offices at scheduled times, whether that’s on the same day or, in the case of big events, even months after the order has been placed.

City Pantry currently serves companies like Eventbrite, Amazon, WeWork, and Slack, among others. To date, the company had raised £5.1 million (~$6.4 million USD).

Just Eat is Old Guard when it comes to third-party restaurant food delivery services, having started in Denmark in 2001 and expanded its marketplace across Europe as well as Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, and Brazil.

The company of late has been on a buying spree, acquiring Flyt this past January and Practi in April. In both cases, technology was at the center of the deal. Practi’s software lets Just Eat incorporate a full management platform — front and back of house — into restaurants it works with who don’t already have such technology in place. For those that do, Flyt provides the tools to integrate existing systems with Just Eat’s.

The City Pantry acquisition will help Just Eat strengthen its presence in the corporate catering sector in both the UK and internationally.

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