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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Forkable

Corporate Catering Service ezCater Raises $100M, Eyes International Expansion

Online business catering service, ezCater, has raised $100 million in Series D funding, the company will announce on Tuesday. The new investment is led by Wellington Management Company with participation from existing investors ICONIQ Capital, Insight Venture Partners and others. This brings the total amount raised by ezCater to $170 million.

EzCater’s marketplace connects businesses with catering services and restaurants across the county, as well as offering a suite of products to help restaurants receive and manage orders and deliver large scale meals.

In a press statement, ezCater says that it will use the new funding to “deepen its products, and expand internationally.” According to VentureBeat, ezCater has not announced which countries will will expand into first.

The money also makes a very public statement that ezCater is not going anywhere anytime soon. This could be important to winning new and keeping existing clients as the corporate catering sector appears to be entering a state of flux. In just the past few months, Square acquired Zesty, EAT Club acquired Farm Hill, and Peach laid off 33 percent of its staff.

Plus, the sheer size of the round could put added pressure on rivals such as Platterz ($21.7 million raised), ZeroCater ($17.6 million raised), and Forkable ($813,000 reported, but final amount raised unknown), all of whom can now be outspent by ezCater.

As we’ve said before, there isn’t much corporate catering services can do to differentiate themselves to customers. At the end of the day, companies are trying to keep employees happy and employees don’t care who delivered the meal, only whether or not the food is good and on-time. EzCater’s war chest will now tubocharge its scaling, and help it outlast (or acquire) its smaller competition.

Square Gobbles up Zesty to Bolster Corporate Catering

Square, the merchant services company, announced today that it has acquired “certain assets” of the corporate catering startup, Zesty. This addition will help Square expand its food ordering service, Caviar. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Zesty is only available in the Bay Area, where it works with 150 restaurants to delivery corporate meals. The company had raised $20.7 million since launching in 2013, $17 million of that was in a Series A raised in 2015. Zesty will become part of the Caviar for Teams unit, which launched in 2016. The Zesty team will bring with it “full-fledged, white-glove corporate catering, allowing us to serve companies of all sizes,” Square said in a press announcement.

The acquisition comes at a time when the concept of corporate catering is going through its own evolution. It’s no longer just dumping food in a main room at 11:00 and having people scrum to get it while it’s still hot (and having the worst bits sit uneaten). New types of competitors are springing up with new approaches to feeding hungry employees.

Forkable uses smart recommendations to let employees order individual lunches rather than partake in large buffets. Allset flips the script entirely and makes it easier for employees to get out of the office and pre-order and pre-pay for meals at nearby restaurants. And Byte Foods sets up fridges with healthy snacks and food right inside the office.

But until those become more mainstream, Zesty will keep bringing in chafing dishes and, in the short term, continue operate independently.

Forkable wants Companies to Forgo Buffet Style Lunches

If you’ve ever worked for a company that caters buffet-style lunches every day, then you’re familiar with the 11:30 rush. Hordes of people line up in an attempt to get all the good stuff before its gone. Heaven forbid you’re in a meeting that lasts till noon and all that’s left are tepid tacos or congealed carnitas.

Bay Area startup Forkable wants to change the way companies offer lunch perks by using smart recommendations to deliver individual lunches instead of the massive buffets. In doing so, Forkable believes it can help companies can be more efficient with providing lunches, reducing food waste and making employees happier with their meals.

Here’s how it works. Each week, Forkable offers menu items from roughly 10 different restaurants in a particular area. Companies that sign up for Forkable have employees fill out a brief survey to determine any allergies and food preferences. Then, every Friday, employees receive a notification with their Forkable-suggested meals for the following week. Employees can accept the pre-selected suggestions, or substitute a different choice from a participating restaurant menu.

Forkable has been billed as an AI-driven lunch ordering service that can automatically and intelligently select the right meal for you. But even Forkable co-founder Nick Naczinski admits that this buzzwordy description isn’t exactly what the service does. Forkable lets users rate every meal they receive; based on these ratings, the company can better tailor an individual’s lunch order.

So it’s more like Netflix recommending a movie than Watson combing through massive data sets.

Launched in 2015, Forkable is currently available in 10 markets including the Bay Area, Manhattan, Seattle and Austin. Naczinski confirmed that the company has raised more than the reported $813,000 in funding, but wouldn’t offer specifics, saying only that they have not done an institutional round yet. He also declined to provide any customer numbers, but says Forkable is “consistently profitable and growing.”

Last year, the company focused on improving its technology, and Naczinski says that this year, Forkable is focused on scaling to more markets nationwide. In doing so, it will need to fend off rivals like Seamless and Caviar. It will also have to contend with upstarts like AllSet that are flipping the script and giving employees options to leave the office to visit restaurants on their lunch break.

Having brawled through my share of office lunch buffets, Forkable’s model of automated tailored lunch ordering seems like a good way to reduce food waste and increase employee satisfaction. As it makes its national push, we’ll see if Forkable can really deliver.

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