Unless you’re an avid food prepper, the phrase “what’s for dinner” is probably a phrase you hear every day in most households.
Ten years ago, SideChef founder and CEO Kevin Yu set out to make that question easy by creating an all-in-one cooking, shopping, and meal planning app. He then hired Cadence Hardenbergh as co-founder and COO.
Recipe management itself is not a new concept. SideChef is one of a group of startups bringing technology to a field where it’s common to keep handwritten recipes in folders and his Rolodex. We’ve seen companies like Galley Solutions and meez do it for restaurants, but Pestle, Whisk, Foody, and even Instacart are creating apps for consumers.
However, SideChef’s “secret sauce” is over 12,000 purchasable recipes that you can add to your cart, and all the ingredients you need to make them are delivered or picked up in-store from Walmart. There is also a “create your own” feature so that account holders can upload their own recipes and even publish them.
SideChef co-founders Cadence Hardenbergh and Kevin Yu. Image credit: side chef
The app is free to download and currently has over 20,000 “smart recipes” that users can filter by food preferences, ingredients already in the kitchen, cooking, or cooking time. There is a $4.99 monthly subscription that comes with a premium version that offers recipes from SideChef culinary experts.
Prior to starting the company, Yu was a video game developer for eight years, working at Warcraft and Blizzard. He admits he didn’t know how to cook at the time, but was curious if there was a step-by-step guide via an app to help people cook. It was named “Google Play’s App of the Year” at the time.
“It was a really big validation for us,” Yu told TechCrunch.
The company then landed an initial seed round and built a platform to read step-by-step cooking instructions on tablets, iPhones, Androids, and even smart home hubs. “The beginning of a journey where our mission is to make cooking accessible to everyone.”
But at some point, I realized that monetizing recipe users wasn’t the same as video game users. Mainly, people aren’t going to spend a lot of money to visit the app and buy recipes. So he set out to find his model for business and found that his online groceries were trending, albeit still at a low penetration rate.
“Our idea was to take the structured data we had, map all the ingredients, and send lasagna with one click,” Yu added. “We know all the amounts they need and his serving size, so we can collate some of the grocery databases and send him the right amount of pasta for his sauce or pasta.” can.”
SideChef partnered with Instacart for grocery delivery around 2016, as well as kitchen appliance makers like Sharp, GE, and LG Electronics.
These new business models have paid off. The company doubled his revenue growth for the third straight year. This is partly because Yu was encouraged by the global pandemic, which has seen more people cooking at home.
At the same time, the smart kitchen side led the company to a previously unannounced Series A with LG and is now raising another $6 million in Series B funding. Seed, Series A, Series B by Ideate Ventures, AB Electrolux, Peacock Capital Group, V-ZUG AG, Ilion Capital, Empower Investment, Innolead Investment, LG Technology Ventures, K Zone LLC.
The new funding will allow SideChef to move into its next phase of growth. This includes an end-to-end cooking platform supported by smart kitchen technologies such as image recognition devices, enabling automated cooking and further monetization of the platform including online grocery purchases and contextual marketing. . and data insights.
“We believe we have the most structured data format for recipes in the world,” says Yu. “What started as a self-taught cook has become something of a ‘Rosetta Stone’ that connects the entire industry. ”
