London-based DIY foodtech Dishpatch is best known for its finish-at-home meal kits. In a recent development, the company picked up £10 million in seed funding co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and LocalGlobe.
Ambitious growth plans for 2021
The investment round also involves Stride, Entree Capital, and Entrepreneur First as well as notable angels including Aron Gelbard (Co-Founder and CEO at Bloom & Wild), Mandeep Singh (Co-founder and Founding CEO at Trouva), Songkick’s co-founder Ian Hogarth, Farewill’s co-founder Dan Garrett, and Tracey Dorée, the founder of Llustre and Kindred Capital.
The funds will be used to enable a further 20 restaurants to join the platform by the end of this year, thereby increasing the choice for customers. Also, Dishpatch will increase its team across marketing, tech (including platform development as well as packaging technologists), distribution, and customer service. Also, former COO of Farfetch Andrew Robb will join the Dishpatch board.
Peter Butler, CEO and co-founder, said: “Dining at home should be flavourful, meaningful, and exciting, a departure from the everyday and generic takeaway. Dishpatch creates an entirely new and profitable revenue stream for restaurants, while enabling access to high quality menus no matter where you live. We’re giving the best chefs bigger tables, hand selecting both award-winners and hidden gems yet to be discovered.”
Jeff Jordan, Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz said: “Covid has been a huge catalyst for innovation and Dishpatch has perfectly captured this with the development of its finish-at-home meal kit platform. It offers restaurants an additional revenue stream, opening their addressable market to every consumer in the country. And it offers diners a large and growing selection of high quality, convenient meals from some of the best restaurants in the country. We’re thrilled to be joining them on this journey as they build the future of at-home dining.”
Angela Hartnett, founder of Cafe Murano, commented: “Launching Cafe Murano with Dishpatch kept us going through the pandemic, generating a significant source of revenue enabling us to keep our chefs in the kitchen and our restaurant team busy. We’ve been amazed by the feedback we’ve had from customers across the country and although our restaurants are now open, finish-at-home meal kits are part of our long term plans. Working with Dishpatch is crucial to help us grow this part of our business.”
Finish-at-home meal kits!
Dishpatch’s meal kits are known as finish-at-home kits. Top class restaurant food is delivered to the customer’s door, with clear instructions on heating, finishing, and presenting. Unlike other food delivery services like Deliveroo, or DIY meal kits like Gousto, Dishpatch’s customers are not handed a box of lukewarm dishes or the ingredients to prep for hours. Instead, each individual restaurant carries out all of the food preparation before handing it over to Dishpatch’s fulfilment team. In turn, they pack the boxes and deliver these meal-kits to customers across the UK every Friday.
Massive growth in 10 months
Dishpatch was founded by Peter Butler and James Terry in 2020 to complement and support restaurants. The startup is on a mission to democratise access to great food; to give food lovers, wherever they may be in the country, the chance to eat a feast from a top-rated London restaurant and to provide restaurants with a scalable source of revenue.
Customers can choose from a variety of curated dishes and menus, from the likes of Angela Hartnett’s Cafe Murano and favourite Ottolenghi, as well as from neighbourhood treasures, Roti King, and Gunpowder. Soho staple Andrew Edmunds, Jose Pizarro’s tapas and St. JOHN. Each meal kit can be made for two or designed for larger groups of people curating to those who plan for dinner parties or family gatherings. Menus are fully prepared for customers to finish and reheat at home.
Dishpatch has signed up 25 restaurants and the service has a waiting list of eateries looking to partner with its platform. Over 60% of its customer base reside outside of the M25 and Dishpatch meal kits are delivered to customers over 50 miles.
In less than a year of its launch, Dishpatch has delivered more than 75,000 meals, achieving millions of pounds’ worth of revenue for restaurants that were forced to close due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company touts that 95% of the restaurants on the platform had never delivered food before and had no infrastructure to meet the demand seen during the lockdown.
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