London-based Feast It, an online marketplace that lets you book ‘street food’-styled catering for your work or social event, has picked up $440,000 in seed funding.
Backing the young company is Jeremy Mogford (founder of Brown’s restaurants and owner of Mogford Hotels & Restaurants), Tim Burridge (early investor in Hummus Bros) and Tim Brennan (founder of Caper & Berry Catering), and Tim Score (ex-CFO of ARM holdings).
The additional capital will be used to roll the service out across more of the U.K., where the startup has mainly focused on London and the South of England. I’m also told that Feast It has international ambitions longer term.
Created to streamline the process of booking street food vendors to cater for your wedding, party or event, Feast It operates much like any online marketplace, matching supply with demand. The vision is to open up the catering market to more street food type operators, who often have spare capacity outside of major events, such as festivals and food markets.
The startup currently partners with over 200 of London’s leading street food vendors and restaurants including Patty & Bun, The Breakfast Club, Dirty Burger, Blu Top Ice Cream, Hummus Bros, Bubbledogs and The Cheese Truck. Corporate customers to date include Amazon, WeWork, Pernod Ricard, Samsung, and Brompton.
“We’d been informally organising events behind the scenes but the website is our big play to ‘Uber-fy’ the events catering industry,” says Feast It co-founder Digby Vollrath. “It’s an end to end booking platform that allows an organiser to book the ideal caterer for their event in a matter of minutes. We heavily vet each and every trader to make sure every event we cater is a hit! Later this summer we’ll be rolling out our drink and private chef platforms, partnering with an additional 200 suppliers”.
The marketplace has proved particularly popular for people booking food for their 18th, 21st, 30th, and 40th birthday parties, but of course, corporate events, office lunches and even weddings have seen take up, too.
“Around 30 per cent of bookings so far have been weddings, almost exclusively organised by the bride and we are approached by event planning agencies a lot whose clients have suggested ‘trendy’ street food and we can sort it out for them far quicker than they would be able to,” adds Feast It co-founder Hugo Campbell. “Essentially, we keep our eyes and ears to the ground, always on the lookout for new exciting traders”.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.