After closing a Series B round of $47 million, CookUnity, a small-batch chef-prepared meal delivery company, is experiencing major growth.
Endeavor Capital, Fuel Ventures, Gaingels, and IDCV were all present investors in the round. Insight Partners was the lead investor. Eight months ago, CookUnity, a New York-based company, closed a $15.5million Series A round led By Fuel Venture Capital. Since its inception in 2018, the company has raised $70 million.
Mateo Marietti, founder of CookUnity and CEO, came up with the idea for the subscription-based business five years ago. Marietti is originally from Argentina and worked in food technology. He saw that modern delivery services could only offer limited food options, pricing, and it was a compromise between convenience and variety.
He created CookUnity in order to connect food creators with those who would eat it.
CookUnity is a combination of ready-to-eat meals and a chef-focused business model, which provides home-cooked restaurant-quality meals. A rotating menu offers hundreds of delicious dishes starting at $10.49 per dish. You can also choose to subscribe for four, six or eight meals, twelve, or sixteen meals per week. The meals heat up quickly and include instructions for how to cook them in the microwave or at home with additional toppings or lemon juice.
Marietti explained to TechCrunch, that top-selling chefs make upwards of $1million a year and are given the tools and resources necessary to start a digital-first company.
He said that we are working with farmers to build the infrastructure and provide the ingredients as well as the tech layer for the consumer and chef apps. Although we don't employ any chefs or cook the food ourselves, we provide the tools for chefs to begin recruiting cooks, gather new recipes and organize their teams. We also help them see their sales for the week or day.
Marietti stated that the company's platform already works with well-known chefs such as Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Marc Forgione. The Series B funding will allow it to add more chefs to the mix, including rising stars like Esther Choi and Marc Forgione, Marietti said.
CookUnity began with a flagship kitchen in Brooklyn. It later expanded to San Francisco, Dallas Fort Worth, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The company also opened new kitchens in Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles and Austin after the Series A. With the new funding, the company will be able to accelerate its national expansion by opening new kitchens in Atlanta or Miami before the end of this year. Marietti estimates that CookUnity can serve 88% of the U.S. populace once all the new kitchens have been made available online.
CookUnity has seen a 5550% increase in its revenue over the past 12 months. It currently has more than 50 chefs and plans to add 150 to all its kitchens by mid-2022.
Rebecca Liu-Doyle (principal at Insight Partners) will join the CookUnity board as part of the investment. Insights' model is to follow companies for a long period of time before investing. In CookUnitys instance, Liu-Doyle had been following them for more than 2 years. She stated that Insight was the right time to invest.
CookUnity had a strong product-market fit, chef retention, and liked the company's focus on the food industry. She said that CookUnity was well on its way to creating a large business with subscription-based revenue, as it tackled the complexities of the backend business for chefs.
Both the chefs and the consumers benefit from the unique value proposition. On the chef side, there is a creator economic tailwind that takes the hassle out of scaling businesses. It also allows chefs to create a bigger business than just selling food at their restaurants. CookUnity provides affordable, convenient food that is high in quality and taste without compromising on price.
This is something that very few companies are able to offer: it's democratization on both sides, she said. Mateo has a team that can execute the vision and make incremental improvements to the experience. It takes time. It takes patience and planning to improve your experience.
