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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Sharebite

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.