Meez, a company that creates professional recipe software and aculinary operating system, received its first-ever funding round of $6.5 million to continue developing its tools to help chefs manage their recipes.
Josh Sharkey is the CEO of Meez. The image was created by Evan Sung.
The New York-based technology company was incorporated by Josh Sharkey, a chef for most of his career. The search for a place to keep his recipes and processes started when he lost his notebook 15 years ago. Sharkey wanted a more digital approach to his work, so he used everything from the standard Word documents to spreadsheets.
The idea of how to digitally transform everything stuck with him. There are tools for things like inventory management or financial software, but there wasn't anything built for the things we do in the kitchen.
Meez was built by Sharkey and his team to be a collaboration tool, recipe keeper and progression, training and prep tool all rolled into one.
The first part of the technology is how users put their recipes into the system and the second part is how to make them usable by both the user and their kitchen colleagues. It also includes resources that chefs use daily, like ingredient yields and unit conversion, a menu cost calculator and automated allergen tagging and nutrition analysis.
Meez's software was launched in 2020 and it already counts as clients major restaurants like Jose Andres and Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
Struck Capital led the funding round, which was joined by other companies. The company is backed by angel investors, including the former head of product at Snap, Shef founders and the Bento Box founder and CEO.
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Meez is a software program. Meez is the image credit.
Meez started in December 2020 with 20 paying customers and has grown to more than 750 today among a diverse mix of restaurants, from fine dining to fast casual and culinary schools, an area that Sharkey plans to dig into in the next year. The company's revenue grew 22% month over month, which he attributed to the company's unique approach and digital adoption making its way into the kitchen.
The adoption curve hit the early stages of the food world. Continence professionals are starting to realize how to do more with less, and they can't rely on their labor all the time. Things that worked before the epidemic don't work now. There are other things you have to do to be able to operationalize your content, and there was not a place to do that before.
Sharkey plans to use the new capital to develop an app and technology that will include menu planning, self-onboarding automation and to launch and test direct-to-consumer recipe engagement.
The company plans to grow the team and attract new restaurants. Sharkey expects to add 10 employees to Meez this year.
Some of the most creative and inventive people on the planet are culinary professionals. Adam Struck, CEO of Struck Capital, said in a written statement that due to the physical nature of their work, little attention has been paid to how digital technology can be used to improve their workflows and systems for collaboration. Josh is a professional chef, restaurant industry operator, and technology expert. He has been able to combine the pain points that plague almost all kitchens into a platform that is intuitive, beautifully designed and addresses major pain points for one of the world's largest and oldest industries.
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