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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

corporate catering

Sharebite Raises $15M for its Get-and-Give Corporate Catering Platform

Corporate catering startup Sharebite announced today that it has raised a $15 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Lafayette Square led this round with participation from Essential Capital, Liberty City Ventures, Percy Capital, Reign Ventures, River Park Ventures, London Technology Club and the founders and former executives of Seamless (now part of Grubhub) and Delivery Hero.

On the surface, New York City-based Sharebite is similar to most other corporate catering services. The company’s online platform allows its corporate customers to provide delivered meals to their employees from various restaurants in its service areas (Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Austin, Charlotte, Irvine, and Washington, DC.). Sharebite’s clients can set up parameters like which meals will be delivered and how much of a subsidy per employee is provided.

But what makes Sharebite different from other corporate catering services is its get-and-give approach. For every meal ordered through its service, Sharebite makes a donation to City Harvest to alleviate childhood hunger. As Sharebite Co-Founder and CEO, Dilip Rao explained to me last year, the company gets paid a commission by its restaurants, and a portion of that commission is donated to a local charity.

In its press announcement, Sharebite says that it works with more than 3,000 restaurants and its corporate client list includes WeWork, Coinbase, Better.com, McKinsey and Horizon Media with “hundreds” of companies nationwide in its pipeline.

Sharebite’s fundraise comes at an interesting moment for the entire corporate catering sector. With vaccinations rolling out, companies (and employees) are beginning to determine their office return policies. As companies look to balance productivity, employee interaction and safety, paid office lunches could be a perk that helps ease employees back to their office desk. Or, with fewer people in the office, it could be a nice-to-have that is no longer needed.

Sharebite Brings Meal Donations to Corporate Catering

Company catered meals are a nice perk for employees, but the concept also reinforces have/have not inequalities in American life. Well paid office workers, who obviously have jobs, get hot meals delivered. Those who truly need it, you’re on your own. As with so many facets of our everyday lives, the COVID pandemic has only made these types of inequalities worse, especially at a time when roughly 26 million Americans said their households had food shortages in the past week.

While Sharebite is a corporate catering service facilitating those lunch perks for businesspeople, it is built from the ground up to try and balance out those inequalities. As part of the company’s mission-driven approach, everytime an order is placed on its platform and donation is made to City Harvest in New York City.

Like most corporate catering companies, Sharebite is a software platform that partners with different local restaurants and other foodservice operators in its delivery areas (currently: New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area). Businesses that use the Sharebite platform can set up parameters around what meals are available to employees as well as when and how much they are subsidized. Employees can then order their meals and Sharebite takes care of everything else including delivery.

But in addition to bringing meals to the office, Sharebite takes that extra step and adds the donation component. “We get paid a commission by the restaurant,” Sharebite Co-Founder and CEO, Dilip Rao told me by phone this week, “We take a percent of that commission and donate to City Harvest.”

This, according to Rao, creates a win/win/win situation. Of course, just about every CEO says that of their company, but in Sharebite’s case, that seems to be true. Employees going into the office get meals, restaurants get more business at a time they desperately need it, and City Harvest gets more donations.

Of course, the bigger question now is what will the corporate catering market look like in the coming year. A lot of big companies switched to remote working during the pandemic, and the future of office work is still in flux. Rao said that despite an initial drop off in corporate business early in the pandemic, Sharebite has grown 400 percent year to date.

Sharebite isn’t the only startup that is optimistic about the future of corporate catering. Last week ZeroCater announced a new subsidy feature for its platform to give employers more flexibility when paying for office meals. ZeroCater also believes that its AI-based approach to meal recommendations will help bring more employee satisfaction because their time spent in the office will include a meal more suited to their taste.

This week, Sharebite announced that WeWork was installing Sharebite Stations across its four headquarter offices in New York City. The recently launched Sharebite Station is a tech platform that allows employees to order meals and arrange contactless deliveries inside a building. As part of the arrangement, WeWork and Sharebite are donating more than 15,000 meals to City Harvest.

Sharebite’s get-and-give approach to corporate catering won’t erase existing inequalities, but at least its mission-based approach is a step in the right direction.

Digital Meal Voucher Company Swile Raised $78.7M to Expand Internationally

French startup Swile, previously known as Lunchr, announced today it has raised a $78.7 million (€70 million) Series C round, according to TechCrunch. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bpifrance and Idinvest. This brings Swile’s total funding to €115 million.

Since 2018, Paris-based Swile has been on a mission to disrupt the meal voucher market. In France, employers typically pay part of the value of these tickets, which can be used at most restaurants. And nowadays, more companies are adopting digital replacements to the old paper meal voucher. 

Swile provides one such version of this digital meal voucher via a prepaid card and app. Companies top up employees’ cards each month, and cards can be associated with a person’s bank account. Roughly 200,000 employees across 7,500 companies use Swile right now.

Part of Swile’s new funds will go towards expanding its service internationally. The company says it is looking at Brazil as well as other European countries. Additionally, new funds will go towards offering other non-food benefits to employees, such as reimbursements, gift cards, and events.

Changing up the corporate meal game is something we’re seeing a lot of these days — and with good reason. Thanks to the pandemic, a huge number of employees still working from home, and traditional forms of office lunches, whether vouchers, or catering, have been thrown into uncertainty. Companies have responded with everything from direct-to-consumer meal delivery services for employees to customizable meal plans for virtual sales meetings and events.

As the workforce gets more disparate in terms of location and the state of corporate lunches remains in flux, Swile may be wise to try and diversify its offerings right now.

Uber Eats’ New Vouchers Let You Buy Remote Lunches for Those on Your Virtual Sales Meeting

Uber for Business announced today the launch of Vouchers for Uber Eats, which lets businesses customize their meal plans for employees and customers to meet any scale, whether it’s an individual’s lunch or a 1,000-person virtual event. The program is an expansion of Uber’s corporate meal program, which launched earlier this year, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Uber fast-tracked the expansion of Uber Eats for corporate meals earlier this year, shortly after the pandemic forced shelter-in-place orders and many employees started working from home. That program allows companies to customize meal options for remote employees via the Uber Eats app. Through a dashboard, company admin can set rules around when their workers can order meals and how much they can spend.

Vouchers expands on this, allowing companies to get even more granular about how they manage corporate spending on meals. Today’s press release outlines a few uses for Vouchers, including providing meals for attendees of large-scale virtual events, treating potential clients to lunch at virtual sales meetings, and virtual lunch gatherings for remote employees.

Via the aforementioned dashboard, companies can set controls on the start and end dates of a voucher, set limits on the number of orders, as well as use existing features like ordering times and spending limits. 

They’re not the only third-party food delivery service to be eyeing the corporate catering space as a way of diversifying. DoorDash offers a similar program that includes corporate versions of the DashPass, the service’s monthly subscription service. Grubhub Corporate also offers individual and group orders for companies. 

For many, working from home is here to stay, even with states’ economies slowly reopening. That makes the concept of corporate food delivery a lucrative business to be in right now for these third-party services. And with the U.S. now officially in a recession, tools like Vouchers let companies spend as much or as little as they want to on corporate meals, allowing them to offer aspects of catering without expensive, long-term commitments.

This customizable approach to corporate catering could also be an important asset to offer long into the future. There’s no knowing yet how many workers will actually return to the office and whether traditional catering will even have a place in that setting. Scores of employees all hovering over the same buffet table doesn’t exactly sound appetizing in the sage of social distancing, and it’s possible companies won’t even have the in-person numbers to justify huge orders like they used to. A sliding-scale option with a focus on virtual get-togethers could become the norm going forward.

Freshly Launches Business Service so Companies Can Ship Meals to Employees Working From Home

One of the perks of going into an office, at least for many in the startup world, was the catered lunches. Sheltering in place and people being forced to work from home has obliterated that particular perk. But prepared meal service Freshly could help bring it back — not just for big startups, but for companies of all sizes.

Freshly announced its new Freshly for Business service today. The idea is pretty straightforward: Companies create an account with Freshly, and their employees can order prepared meals for home delivery, just as they can with the consumer service. Meals arrive cold and only need to be reheated in the microwave and served. (I tried Freshly last year and thought the meals were delicious.)

“We’ve always seen the opportunity with businesses to be massive,” Freshly Founder and CEO, Michael Wystrach, told me by phone today. He said Freshly for Business had been on the product roadmap for a while but there was “so much demand with companies trying to solve the COVID challenge. So we accelerated the plans.”

The service can be scaled both in volume and cost. It’s available to companies of any size, and meals can be fully or partially subsidized by the company to fit with budgets. The service is available now and companies can sign up at the Freshly for Business site. Unfortunately, Freshly only ships to the lower 48, so employees in Hawaii and Alaska will need to find some other perk.

Freshly isn’t the only food business adapting to the current state of the world. Last month, NYC corporate catering service Ox Verte pivoted to home office meal delivery. It too was working with existing corporate clients to subsidize meals for employees. And startups like Pepper and Choco are helping restaurant food suppliers transition into direct sales to consumers.

While I had Wystrach on the phone today, I asked him about any changes that have happened with the company’s consumer business since the pandemic started. “We’ve really seen older generations make aggressive moves to the platform,” he said. People over 60 years old used to make up 25 to 35 percent of Freshly’s customer base; since the COVID-19 outbreak, the over 60 set now accounts for more than 50 percent. This make sense as older people in particular are susceptible to the virus and really need to rely on food delivery and not leave the house.

In March, Freshly shipped 4.2 million meals and is close to hitting 1 million meals a week (back in August, the company was doing 600,000 meals a week). Freshly has also seen an increase in the amount of food people are ordering, with average order sizes jumping 20 percent. This too makes sense, as panicked people are too scared to go into the grocery store, unable to get a grocery delivery time, or not wanting to pay exorbitant restaurant delivery fees, and are probably stocking up on food wherever they can find it.

With dire predictions for what a COVID+flu season in the fall could look like, chances are good that this won’t be the last time we are ordered to stay at home. That means more working from home offices. It’s smart for food companies like Freshly to have the infrastructure in place to accommodate the back-and-forth future we are likely to be living with for some time to come.

Sifted Wants to Be the One-Stop Solution for the Catered Office Lunch

Say you’re a newish tech company looking to attract coveted young programmers to your startup. How do you entice them?

One trend more and more offices are looking to is catered lunches. But unless you’re a Google or a Facebook with a giant in-house team constantly making fresh food on site, you’ll have to choose a catering partner. And that’s where the options start to stack up: Do you want to order directly from local restaurants? Farm the selection and ordering process out to a middleman? Put a bunch of cold cuts and a salad bar out and call it a day?

Jess Legge and Kimberly Lexow co-founded Sifted four years ago to simplify the ways offices handle catered lunches. The Atlanta-based catering operation serves workplaces which invest heavily in lifestyle perks. But unlike most other services, Sifted handles the entire catering process in-house, from ingredient sourcing to menu planning to food prep and delivery.

Monday through Friday, the company offers two lunch options: one with meat, one vegetarian. All of Sifted’s food is served buffet-style. Pricing depends on the size of staff required and frequency of service. Sifted company currently has around 150 staff.

Throughout our conversation, Legge kept repeating one phrase: “We really want to become your single food vendor.” However, that definition seems chiefly narrowed on lunch. Legge told me that Sifted will also do Happy Hours and snack services, but their main focus is midday eating.

According to Legge, Sifted’s main draw is that its entire operation is controlled in-house. The company has a chef team in each of their cities — Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Seattle, Nashville, and, next month, Phoenix — which work out of commercial kitchen spaces. Sifted also has a staff to set up and serve food. This level of control gives more transparency to Sifted’s office partners (they always know exactly where the food is coming from), and also gives the company the flexibility to pivot and adjust offerings based on diner feedback.

This is where Sifted can really differentiate itself. Every day, Sifted staff record metrics for production, worker lunch participation, etc. After service, all leftovers are weighed, to inform decisions about future food offerings. For example, based off of leftovers, Sifted could surmise that a particular office loved the Eggplant Parmesan but wasn’t a fan of the Chicken Parmesan, and update their menus accordingly. “Data drives us,” Legge emphasized.

Sifted has another value-add: its crusade against food waste. Legge told me Sifted tries to source the most sustainable ingredients possible, including over-supplied product and “ugly” produce that other food companies might pass over. The company also recently partnered with Copia, an excess-food donation platform, to give each day’s leftover food to those in need. It will be the first of Copia’s partners to donate 100 percent of its uneaten food to local nonprofits.

Reducing the amount of food you donate or throw away is just smart business. But it’s also a smart marketing move in a climate where people — especially millennials — are caring more and more about things like sustainability.

Sifted will need to use every card in its hands to distinguish itself in the crowded corporate catering space, especially since many of its competitors are expanding quickly and raising hefty funds along the way. Chewse raised $19 million for “family style” catering, Oh My Green raised $20 million, and ezCater raised an eye-popping $100 million. However, there’s also been lots of consolidation in the space: Peach laid off 33 percent of its staff, Square bought Zesty, and EAT Club acquired Farm Hill.

Legge is aware of the intense competition in the corporate catering space. But she’s adamant that Sifted’s end-to-end business model gives them a leg up, despite their lack of funding. “With Sifted, eaters know exactly what they’re eating and what to expect,” she said.

So far, Sifted has very intentionally avoided fundraising. Legge explained to me that they want to grow organically, without being beholden to investors’ “grow quickly” mentalities. This strategy is a double-edged sword. Without investor pressure the startup might be able to avoid the bust that has befallen other office catering companies in the past year. Then again, less money = less fuel for growth.

Sure, companies could work with small local caterers and get the same level of transparency and consistency in the food they order. But Sifted is taking that type of intimate partnership and applying it to each of their locations across the country, all while maintaining an ethos of sustainability. That might be an attractive enough option to entice more partnerships with offices across the country — and it’s certainly better than a sub-par platter of cold cuts.

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.

U.K. Corporate Catering Company Feedr Raises £1.5M

U.K.-based corporate catering startup, Feedr, has raised a £1.5 million (~$1.92M USD) pre-Series A round of funding led by Episode 1, according to TechCrunch. This brings the total amount raised by Feedr to £2.1M (~$2.69M USD).

Feedr works with local restaurants to create a rotating daily menu for office workers at participating companies. Employees can pay for lunches themselves or get a subsidy through their company. Feedr then coordinates the logistics and delivery of ordered food to the office. Providing that type of service in and of itself is not that remarkable. Companies like Forkable here in the U.S. do much the same thing in the U.S., allowing employees to order their own meals from restaurant menus.

The Feeder news stood out because the overall corporate catering space has been so quiet lately. There was the Oh My Greens funding announcement in October, but that was just a formal announcement of all the money it had raised since 2016. For the most part, there really hasn’t been any news coming out of the corporate catering sector in the past few months.

The first half of the year was a much different story for startups wanting to feed hungry employees. Hungry raised $1.5 million. ZeroCater raised $12 million. And ezCater raised a whopping $100 million. There was also consolidation as Square bought Zesty, EAT Club acquired Farm Hill (and ceased operating in NYC), ezCater bought French company GoCater, and Peach laid off 33 percent of its staff.

I expect we’ll see more consolidation in 2019 as smaller players are weeded out and gobbled up by those with more funding. We’ll also need to keep an eye on the rapidly growing Uber Eats, which earlier this month launched Uber Eats for Business to deliver office meals, especially if the company gets you your burrito by drone.

EAT Club Suspends Operations in New York City

Corporate catering service EAT Club is suspending operations in New York City as of today.

EAT Club sent us the following statement about the matter:

EAT Club will be suspending service in New York City as of Friday, 8/3. As part of our ongoing market assessment, we believe that suspending service in this saturated market is the right move for our young business at this time. Following our acquisition of Farm Hill earlier this year, we continue to see strong growth in both the Bay area and Los Angeles— delivering over 20k meals per day – and want to focus on new and existing markets with the greatest immediate growth potential. – Doug Leeds, CEO, EAT Club

We reached back out to EAT Club to see if those NY employees were laid off, or if they have been reassigned within the company. We will update this post as we learn more.

As the company mentioned, the move comes just a few months after EAT Club acquired Farm Hill, a different corporate catering service, and got a new CEO (Leeds).

But it’s also in line with the larger shifts we’ve seen happening as the corporate catering sector matures. In May, Peach laid off 33 percent of its staff after a “sales experiment” didn’t pan out. In April, Square augmented its Caviar service by acquiring “certain assets” of Zesty. But elsewhere, ezCater raised a whopping $100 million for its corporate catering, and expanded into France through its acquisition of GoCater.

All these machinations are also coming at a time when free corporate lunches are coming under scrutiny. Mountain View put in new rules clamping down on free lunches at Facebook, and San Francisco is looking at banning corporate cafeterias in new office construction.

San Francisco Eyes Ban on New Corporate Cafeterias

Like a shark smelling blood in the water, the city of San Francisco is looking to clamp down on the free lunches that keep tech workers from spending money in local neighborhoods.

The New York Times writes:

“Two San Francisco supervisors introduced an ordinance last week that would forbid employee cafeterias in new corporate construction. It is not clear whether the measure will pass, but it is a direct attack on one of the modern tech industry’s most entrenched traditions.”

The ordinance was introduced around the same time new surfaced that neighboring city Mountain View had placed restrictions on the free food offered at Facebook’s new offices in that city.

The problem these and many other cities in the Bay Area face is that tech workers who receive free meals throughout the day (not to mention snacks, beer, coffee and kombucha on tap) have no incentive to ever leave the office and spend money at nearby restaurants and bodegas.

When San Francisco offered tax deals to companies like Twitter to keep them in the city, they hoped that the shiny new tech offices would result in a revitalization of the areas around them. This hasn’t happened, and the fact that tech workers don’t venture outside their offices to eat or drink is a big part of that.

San Francisco won’t consider this new ban until the fall, and even then, it will only address cafeterias in new construction. This means that existing cafeterias and corporate catering services won’t be impacted. Which is good news for the number of startups in the corporate catering space that have secured millions in funding over the past year.

But the city has shown it’s not afraid to bite the hands that feed it. Last year it enacted strict rules over how delivery robots could roam its sidewalks.

There could be an intangible halo effect from all this municipal scrutiny. While the idea of a city telling employees of private businesses where they can and can’t eat is unsettling, perhaps the public attention will force companies to at least examine their existing policies — and do more to share their wealth.

If you are interested in the future of lunch at work, be sure to come to the Smart Kitchen Summit: North America in October where we’ll be hosting a panel dedicated to “Leave The Lunch Box Behind: How Tech Is Changing How We Eat At Work” with speakers from Chowbotics, EZCater, and more.

ezCater Acquires French Startup GoCater to Expand into Europe

When ezCater raised $100 million last month, the corporate catering company said it would use some of that money to expand internationally. True to its word, ezCater announced today that it is acquiring Paris-based GoCater to gain an immediate foothold in Europe. This is the first acquisition for ezCater and terms of the deal were not disclosed.

GoCater currently operates in both France and Germany, where, according to the press announcement, the company has “hundreds of catering partners” that serve “thousands of business customers.” GoCater was founded in 2016 by Giorgio Riccò and Stephen Leguillon, who spun it out of La Belle Assiette, a European platform for booking private chefs that operates in France, Belgium, Luxemobourg, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

EzCater Co-founder and CEO, Stefania Mallett told me in an interview that Riccò and Leguillon’s experience growing La Belle Assiette in Europe made GoCater an attractive acquisition target. Europe isn’t a monolith; each country has their own regulations and culture that need to be properly understood before a company can break into their markets. “With GoCater we are getting a team on the ground in Europe with experience operating in multiple countries,” Mallett said, “That is very powerful for us.”

The acquisition comes at a time when the corporate catering market is maturing and going through its own growing pains. This year has seen a lot of activity in the space with Square acquiring Zesty, EAT Club acquiring Farm Hill, and Peach laying off 33 percent of its staff. Other corporate catering services like Hungry, ZeroCater and Platterz have all received funding, but none nearly as much as ezCater.

EzCater claims to be the biggest corporate catering company in the U.S., and as noted, the company raised a whopping $100 million funding round last month. With a warchest brimming with cash, Mallett said it was “Time to grow like crazy and widen the gap.”

For now, GoCater will continue to operate as GoCater in Europe until trademark and other related issues are sorted out. European expansion is bound to be a topic of discussion with Michelle Smart, ezCater’s VP of Partner Operations, when she speaks at our Smart Kitchen Summit this October (get your tickets now!).

Hungry Raises $1.5M for its Chef-Centric Corporate Catering

There are a lot of things going against corporate catering startup Hungry. It’s based in Virginia, not Silicon Valley or New York or some other major tech hub. It only services select parts of D.C., Maryland and Virginia. And though the company just raised a $1.5 million seed round, that amount is tiny compared with competitor ezCater, which this week raised a whopping $100 million.

But one thing Hungry does have going for it is their approach to providing meals for office workers. Whereas most business catering services act as brokers between companies and restaurants, Hungry connects companies with independent chefs. And these aren’t just ordinary chefs; they’re former White House chefs, Iron Chef and Chopped champions, and James Beard Award winners.

Clients can visit the Hungry website and peruse the chefs in its network, along with the menus they serve. They can then select a chef/food combo and order up to 24 hours in advance. Chefs give Hungry their max capacity of meals per day and if that number is hit, they’re temporarily hidden from the site until they can catch up. Hungry then sends its “captains” out to pick up the food from the chefs’ kitchens, then deliver and set it up at the client’s office.

Hungry Founder and COO Eman Pahlevani explained to me why he thinks his company’s chef-centric approach is a better one for corporate catering:

Hungry’s network of 50 chefs all work out of commercial kitchens, so they don’t incur the hefty costs associated with a full restaurant. Hungry only offers breakfast and lunch, so chefs have better hours and are done at noon. Hungry takes care of new customer acquisition and delivery, so chefs can focus on food. The service also cuts down on food waste because chefs know how many orders they need to prepare in advance and stock up accordingly.

For clients, Pahlevani said that because they chefs have less overhead, they can charge less, which means that clients pay less for lunches. Plus each delivery captain works with the same clients each time, so they know where to unload and set up, minimizing hassle for the office manager.

Hungry currently has 300 clients including Amazon and Microsoft. They have 50 chefs in its network, who, according to Pahlevani, average about $10,000 to $12,000 a month in revenue. Hungry makes its money by marking up the wholesale menu prices set by the chef.

Yesterday’s $1.5 million brings the total amount raised by Hungry to $4.5 million. The company plans to use the money to expand into a new market — most likely Philadelphia — by the end of this year.

As we’ve noted, the corporate catering market is both frothy and in flux at the moment. In addition to the aforementioned ezCater raise, both ZeroCater and Platterz have raised double-digit million rounds this year. But at the same time, you see some retrenchment as Square acquired Zesty, EAT Club acquired Farm Hill and Peach laid off 33 percent of its staff.

Hungry may not have the war chests of its rivals, but it’s at least got an interesting approach. Now we’ll see if people in other parts of the country are hungry for it.