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WoodSpoon Raises $14M to Expand its Home Chef Marketplace

WoodSpoon, the New York City-based online marketplace where home chefs can make their food available for ordering and on-demand delivery, announced today that it has raised a $14 million Series A round of funding. Restaurant Brands International (RBI) led the round with participation from World Trade Ventures, Victor Lazarte and other individual investors. This brings the total amount of funding raised by WoodSpoon to $16 million.

WoodSpoon is part of a slowly but steadily rising movement of startups such as DishDivvy and Shef that enable home cooks to sell their wares online. WoodSpoon vets potential home cooks for safety, sanitation and food quality before admitting them on to the platform. Once a chef is onboarded, WoodSpoon takes care of the logistics like insurance and delivery, and even helps with things like food photos and videos to better tell chefs’ stories. WoodSpoon currently operates in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens in New York City, where users download the WoodSpoon app or visit the website, order a meal and have it delivered in 30 to 40 minutes.

Oren Saar, Co-Founder and CEO of WoodSpoon told me during a video chat last week that the company currently has 150 active home chefs on its platform (“active” means they’ve cooked meals for sale two times in the past month). Saar also said that 35 percent of customers who buy their first meal on WoodSpoon buy an additional three meals on the service within 17 days.

Selling home-cooked meals is still very much a new idea, and regulations are still being worked out on a state-by-state basis. Because of this, Saar said that WoodSpoon puts a lot of effort into educating potential customers about the idea of buying your neighbor’s home cooked meals. Part of that process, Saar said, was putting the chefs front and center, highlighting the home cooks themselves and the kitchens where meals are made. “You can read everything about the chef making your food,” Saar said, “That should reduce the automatic bias.”

WoodSpoon’s funding is the second big raise we’ve seen from a home cook marketplace this summer, as Shef raised $20 million in June. Shef is a little different from WoodSpoon however, as Shef isn’t on-demand. It delivers prepared meals cold that are then heated up by the customer.

With its new capital, Saar said that WoodSpoon will expand to cover all of New York City before moving on to be in up to 15 different markets across the U.S. Worth noting about this funding round is that it’s led by RBI, which owns the famous QSR brands Burger King, Popeye’s and Tim Horton’s. RBI’s involvement could possibly help accelerate regulatory clarity and acceptance of legalized home cooking across the country, and perhaps it could even help create mini home cook moguls go from neighborhood business to national brand.

Could the Budding Home Chef Biz Give Alternative Meats a Boost?

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Not to brag, but I make a mean Impossible burger. The trick is frying it on an electric griddle in butter to get a nice crust on it and loading it up with grilled onions (chef’s kiss).

While I am proud of my plant-based burger cooking and assembly skills, I have no aspirations of going into business selling them. But I’m sure there are others out there who do. I started thinking about the nascent home chef business sector, where everyday people can sell the meals they make at home to other people, when Foodnome got approval to operate its first Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation (MEHKO) in the Bay Area this week. Foodnome is similar to other startups in the space like Shef and Woodspoon, creating a marketplace to connect home chefs and customers. As I was thinking about these startups and my Impossible burgers, I wondered whether home chefs could give plant-based foods a market boost.

At first, it seems premature to even ask this question. The home chef space is currently very small as rules and regulations about what food people can sell out of their kitchen are still being developed. So there aren’t a lot of home restaurants out there. Additionally, it’s not like plant-based meats need a boost from this small segment. According to the Good Food Institute, plant-based meat sales have grown 72 percent over the past two years and the category is currently worth $1.4 billion.

So right now, the idea of a tiny home cook sector moving the needle on plant-based proteins seems academic at best. But if home chef-ing becomes a viable (and legal) money-making option for people, we could see a wave of independent restaurants pop up out of people’s homes. My guess is these businesses will probably start out as side hustles for most as people dip their toes in to test the waters, and won’t involve a ton of capital expenditure (they’ve already got the kitchen and the pots and pans!). As such, these home restaurants can take more risks. Risks like serving up a delivery-only menu exclusively full of plant-based offerings.

In the case of plant-based burgers, sure, sales are growing, but the sector is still dwarfed by traditional animal-based meat. Business Insider reported in May that beef sales in America grew to $30.3 billion in 2020. So if you were to open your own burger joint, you’d have a much bigger audience selling conventional burgers than you would selling plant-based ones.

But as with movies, books and blogs, the home chef business is about the longer tail. Building out a restaurant, buying equipment, hiring staff — all of that takes a lot of money and you want a safer bet with the food you sell. If you run your own food operation out of your home, you are free to take more risks (especially if it is a side hustle and not your main source of income). So you could experiment with plant-based meat (and dairy and eggs) menus because you don’t have to please as many people.

Take my Impossible burgers for example. I believe they are delicious enough that someone paying $7 or so for one would find that was money well spent. I do not believe, however, that I could justify the cost of launching a traditional restaurant to serve them. I’m not sure there are enough plant-based burger fans in my geographic area to support that type of standalone business, and there are already a number of animal-based burger places where I live so launching my own restaurant for them seems like a fool’s errand.

But if I could make and sell them from my kitchen… well, that’s a different story. I wouldn’t need as much money to start, and I could determine the hours I want work (e.g., dinners and weekends only), making the idea of running a food business more enticing. And since I’m not spending as much time or money, I could cater to the smaller number of people in my town who want plant-based burgers.

Chances are good that I’m not alone in this type of thinking. There are probably a lot of people who make unique plant-based burgers, burritos and pizza out there. Being able to launch such a business from the comfort of their own kitchens means we could see a lot of new plant-based virtual restaurants spring up across the country.

Again, this is all more of a thought experiment right now. As noted, there is still a lot left to be determined around the regulation of home cooking, and it presents a new paradigm in meal ordering that customers would still need to figure out. But I think it’s worth considering because a large number of smaller, independent home restaurants could bring about big changes to where people eat.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Foodnome launched this week. We regret the error.

Image via Eat Just.

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Homemade Food Delivery Service WoodSpoon Raises $2M

WoodSpoon, an NYC-based service that delivers meals made by home chefs, announced today it has raised $2 million in seed funding. The round was led by World Trade Ventures with participation from Silvertech Ventures. 

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the funding round will help WoodSpoon expand both in the New York area and into other states in the future. The company’s platform connects home chefs — both professionals and hobbyists — with local customers who can purchase available meals in their area via a mobile app. WoodSpoon, which launched this year, says it now has about 100 chefs on its platform, including those who have worked at Nobu, Cipriani, The Modern, and other notable restaurants. 

The legality of meal services for home chefs varies from state to state in the U.S., largely due to safety concerns. Speaking to the safety issue, WoodSpoon CEO and cofounder Oren Saar told me earlier this year that his company conducts a rigorous vetting process that includes interviews, evaluation of the food itself, and kitchen inspections. All chefs also have to be in compliance with NYC’s regulations and permit requirements, which vary depending on the type of food the chef plans to make from their home. Saar said many of WoodSpoon’s chefs, which include a number of individuals out of work because of the pandemic, will often use their own commercial facilities to fulfill orders.

The business for homemade delivery meals isn’t widespread in the U.S. yet, for the aforementioned legality issues. California is another state where it’s possible to make money as a home chef. To that end, a company called Shef, based in the San Francisco area, also recently raised a seed round of funding. 

Back east, WoodSpoon is currently available in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island City, Hoboken, and Jersey City. The service will soon expand to Queens and The Bronx.