WoodSpoon, a NYC tech startup that connects home chefs with locals looking to buy their food, is planning to expand into new markets after raising $14 million in fresh funding. The Series A was led by Restaurant Brands International, and comes less than a year after the company landed its $2 million seed round.
Co-founder and CEO Oren Saar says WoodSpoon is often referred to as the “Airbnb of restaurants” or the “Uber of restaurants” — it offers a way to share. But instead of homes or rides, the platform allows people to share food. In just 30 to 40 minutes, users can have a home-cooked meal made by a chef in their area delivered right to their door.
“WoodSpoon looks and feels very similar to any other food delivery app that you’ve probably ever used,” Saar told Built In. “It’s just that the main difference is that you’re not ordering food from restaurants, [you’re ordering] from local home chefs who are cooking in their kitchen.”
On the chefs’ side, WoodSpoon handles every aspect of pricing, packaging and delivery, allowing them to focus on what they’re good at: making delicious food. The company also vets all the home chefs with interviews, kitchen inspections and training to ensure all the meals prepared are high quality.
While some of the chefs on the platform hail from famous, Michelin-starred restaurants, others are home cooks or immigrants with a passion for their native country’s cuisine. Either way, the goal is simply to provide an extra revenue stream for these chefs, and a way for them to get their cooking out into the world easily. It’s also a way for them to develop a more personal relationship with the people who eat their food, as Saar explained.
“I think that’s what’s so unique about our platform, the personal connections we’re creating between people,” Saar said. “It’s not like when you buy food from Uber Eats or DoorDash, where you don’t know who is making the food.... [With WoodSpoon], you really know who is making your food, what’s their story. We have people that buy food from the same home chef over and over again, and they start communicating. You know: ‘Chef Kevin, your food is so good. Thank you for sending those free cookies last time, I really enjoyed it.’ And then Kevin responds by saying, ‘Tonight, I’m going to send you a tiramisu I’ve been working on, please let me know how it was because I’m thinking of adding it to my menu.’ That's where it starts getting interesting, when you see a connection is getting created.”
Of course, these kinds of connections are more than just a cool, fun novelty — they’ve proven to be an important lifeline for chefs at a particularly tumultuous time for this industry. The COVID-19 pandemic brought the entire hospitality industry to its knees, forcing many restaurants to shut their doors for months or even permanently. And more than a year later, between labor shortages and the delta variant, many restaurants still haven’t fully recovered. WoodSpoon has provided one way to ease some of that stress for individual cooks, and has been riding some big tailwinds as a result.
WoodSpoon was launched in 2019, just a few months before COVID hit the United States. Saar says that, within the first month of the pandemic, the company got “hundreds and hundreds” of applications from chefs looking to join the app, and continues to get hundreds more. It also saw a surge in users looking for alternatives to traditional food delivery options. All told, the company says it has experienced 50 percent month-over-month growth in every aspect of its business, from new customers to home chefs onboarded to revenue.
To keep up, WoodSpoon will double its NYC-based team, which now consists of about 10 people. The company also plans to expand its services to other markets outside of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens over the next 12 to 18 months, but Saar says exact cities and timelines are still being worked out.
