UK-based Dishpatch, a finish-at-home meal kit platform that claims to bring the best of London’s ‘world-beating’ food scene to homes across the UK, announced that it has raised £10M (approx €11.64M) in its Seed round of funding. With this development, former COO of Farfetch Andrew Robb will join the Dishpatch board.
Investors in this round
The Seed round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and LocalGlobe. In addition, the round also saw participation from Stride, Entree Capital, and Entrepreneur First as well as notable angel investors including Aron Gelbard (co-founder & CEO at Bloom & Wild), Mandeep Singh (co-founder & Founding CEO at Trouva), Ian Hogarth (co-founder of Songkick), Dan Garrett (co-founder of Farewill), and Tracey Dorée (founder of Llustre and Kindred Capital).
Jeff Jordan, Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz says, “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.”
Use of the funds
The proceeds from this round will help Dishpatch to enable a further 20 restaurants to join the platform by the end of this year (2021). Additionally, the capital will also be invested in increasing the startup’s team across marketing, tech (including platform development as well as packaging technologists), distribution, and customer service.
“Exclusive menus, delivered across the country”
Founded in 2020 by Peter Butler – a restaurant operations expert, and James Terry – a digital entrepreneur, Dishpatch is the ‘antithesis of Deliveroo’. The startup mentions in a statement that it is on a mission to democratise access to great food; to give food lovers the chance to eat a feast from a top-rated London restaurant and to provide restaurants with a scalable source of revenue.
The company claims that each feast can be made for two people, or, customers can also design their feast for larger groups of people, to serve restaurant-quality food at dinner parties or family gatherings. The menus come fully prepped for customers to finish and reheat at home.
Dishpatch 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, famous for nose-to-tail eating, are also represented, alongside handpicked eateries from across the capital.
What does the startup offer?
According to Dishpatch, it partners only with the leading independent, and chef-led eateries. It works with each partner restaurant to curate exclusive finish-at-home meal kits based on the establishment’s menus and food styles.
Its meal kits are known as ‘finish-at-home’, which contains restaurant food, with clear instructions on heating, finishing, and presenting. Dishpatch claims that unlike delivery services like Deliveroo, or DIY meal kits like Gousto or Hello Fresh, customers aren’t handed a box of lukewarm dishes, nor are they given the raw ingredients to prep.
Instead, each individual restaurant carries out all of the food preparation before handing it over to Dishpatch’s fulfilment team who package the boxes before dispatching them to addresses across the UK every Friday.
Helping the restaurants and their customers
Dishpatch was initially founded to help restaurants when the first lockdown hit, by allowing eateries a way to reach new and existing customers. However, despite the ease of lockdown and the reopening, restaurants were still restricted in the number of tables they have. This is where Dishpatch steps in. It gives restaurants a new, wider customer base and an additional revenue stream.
Peter Butler, CEO and co-founder, says, “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.”
Let’s talk numbers
To date, the company has signed up 25 restaurants, and the service has a waiting list of eateries looking to partner with the end-to-end tech and operations platform. According to Dishpatch, over 60 per cent of its customer base live outside of the M25 (Road in England) and the average distance a Dishpatch meal kit travels is over 50 miles.
In the last 10 months, the company has managed to deliver more than 75,000 meals and has achieved millions of pounds’ worth of revenue for restaurants that were forced to close. And, this is great news for the restaurants as Dishpatch reported that 95 per cent of the restaurants on the platform had never delivered food before and had no infrastructure to meet the demand seen during the lockdown.
Besides new customer, Dishpatch says, more than 50 per cent of at-home diners are repeat customers, and more than 70 per cent of orders are made more than a week in advance. The startup is also proving to be a popular way for diners to discover new restaurants, with 75 per cent of customers ordering kits from restaurants that they have never eaten at before.
