While there are hundreds if not thousands of software tools designed for the business world, there are not many SaaS platforms designed for restaurant kitchens.
In 2020, professional chef Josh Sharkey founded meez, a tech platform that allows professional chefs and mixologists to take all of the recipes floating around old notebooks and spreadsheets and compile them into an interactive database. This allows them to easily scale recipes up or down without worrying about “questionable culinary math,” as meez states on its website.
Sharkey said in a statement that the restaurant industry has often relied on inventory planning software systems designed for other businesses. So it’s no surprise that the restaurant industry has been quick to adopt a software tool designed by and for professional chefs. Meez is now used in more than 1,200 kitchens worldwide, with tens of thousands of active users.
The restaurant tech platform will continue its growth trajectory after announcing $11.5 million in Series A funding on Thursday. The Series A round was led by Craft Ventures.
“Our recipe workflow tool is dedicated entirely to the recipe process, from ideation through execution,” Sharkey said in a statement. “My team is excited to use this investment to help even more restaurants and bars have control over their culinary IP by connecting the creation and management of recipes with the multiple business functions they affect.”
In addition to scaling recipes up or down, meez also makes it easier for chefs to share their recipes with colleagues, convert recipes to any unit of measure and make better decisions about menu pricing.
Meez has grown from 16 to 38 employees since raising a $6.5 million seed round in January. A portion of its latest Series A has been used to grow its product and engineering teams, and the company plans to continue using the investment to expand those teams in 2023, according to meez’s senior marketing manager Liz Van Hoose.
The fresh funding will also be used to build new premium features and to drive awareness of its free product, which launched on Thursday. The free version of meez provides access to many of its core features, like recipe organization, scaling and sharing. The premium version of meez will also be expanded to include new features that allow chefs to tweak their menu items in response to sales, demand and margin data.
