Whisk And Foodity Both Raise Funds To Link Recipes To Grocery Stores

It’s been an interesting day for a developing market which seems so utterly niche as to be untrue. There really are startups out there linking recipes to supermarket so you can just buy the food you need to make the dishes. Niche, but potentially quite powerful. Two start-ups announced funding today in the UK. Whisk, a startup produced by a minor UK TV celebrity, has raised £170,000 for a product that has yet to launch, while Foodity has secured over £300,000 seed funding for a platform that’s already being traded on and has customers after bootstrapping for two years.

Foodity produces an e-commerce toolkit for recipe publishers on all platforms that lets consumers buy recipe ingredients at major online grocers in the UK, Europe and the US; plus a data platform and an advertising/analytics module. The startup already has Premier Foods, (the UK’s biggest food manufacturer) as a customer and a number of big grocery retailers, as yet unannounced.

Backing Foodity – founded by Johnathan Agnès – is Hercules Fisherman, a founder of consumer engagement platform Fizzback (sold to Nice Systems six months ago, for $88m); Dr Vishal Talwar, a marketing expert from the LSE; and Themos Kalafatis a data analytics expert. Fisherman also joins to develop the company’s artificial intelligence platform.

Meanwhile, Nick Holzherr, a finalist on the BBC1’s The Apprentice show this year, and co-founder Craig Edmunds secured a £170,000 investment for Whisk from Angels – some tech some not – including Nate Macleitch (chairman of cloud computing company Quickblox); Doug Scott (affiliate ads entrepreneur), Peter Dines and Guy Morris, who part-sold digital marketing business Media Ingenuity.

Whisk interprets recipes, creates a shopping list and then adds that shopping list into the basket of the user’s online supermarket of choice. At first, Whisk will connect to a few select supermarkets and hopefully grow the list of online retailers available.