Where Restaurants Get Their Food
Foodem launched its online platform eight months ago to connect food suppliers with restaurants. Now a new city and funding are on the horizon, along with a burger or two.
It's doubled the number of suppliers using the system, its catalog has tripled, and the Baltimore-based company has a large restaurant chain as a major customer. (The name could not yet be revealed.) Founder Kash Rehman also says Foodem has a partnership with the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, which will market Foodem’s service to its 800 members. It's currently only supplying DC, but Kash says a new major city will be added before the end of the year. He tells us the B2B product could eventually be marketed to any business with a commercial kitchen, including caterers, day cares, country clubs, and hotels.
The company also plans to raise a $2.5M series A round to add to the $75k it raised from TEDCO and a $600k seed round raised last March. The funding will be used to hire sales, marketing, and product development people. Kash says a lesson learned since launching is that it wasn’t enough to just sign up restaurants to use the service. They needed help building the lists of products they would order each week through Foodem. Once the order guides were in the system, usage soared, says Kash. Now restaurants are using it to buy most of their products rather than buying in one or two food categories.
