Online site connects chefs with suppliers
JAMES Nathan happily admits his day job can help him and his partner get the occasional last-minute booking at a coveted Sydney restaurant on a Friday night.
It’s the sort of perk VIPs and celebrities might be used to.
But for Nathan, the co-founder of online start-up Food Orbit, you could almost say its market research. An idea planted when he was working in some well known London kitchens, Food Orbit has become Nathan’s full-time job as he seeks to build, refine and fund its growth.
Conceived as an online ordering platform to connect restaurants with local farmers, Food Orbit collected the people’s choice award in October at the inaugural Carnegie’s Den event, a kind of speed dating for cashed-up venture capital investors and start-ups hoping to attract funding that is being supported by The Australian.
Since then Nathan has been focused on how to find the money to fund the technical and sales resources needed to take the business into the mainstream.
“When you are a start-up you need to do product updates and revisions all of the time,’’ Nathan said. “We are very much at the stage of wanting to take a product and commercialise it, so for us it is mainly around the tech side of things and then sales ... that is where we will be spending our money.’’
Nathan takes every opportunity to refine the business model and the pitch to investors and says the contact with investors since the Den experience has been vital to that process.
“We pivoted our model slightly. Previously we were focused on trying to shorten the food chain by connecting farmers with restaurateurs, whereas now we were about creating a one-stop shop to connect (the chef) with all of his suppliers as well as some speciality goods producers that we have got access to.’’
The exposure also led to a partnership with Marketboomer, a business owned by the ASX-listed Qanda Technology.
Marketboomer already supplies large hotel chains and Qantas lounges and had relationships with 5000 wholesalers that Food Orbit could take out to its restaurant clients.
The pitch to a restaurant now is that Food Orbit might now cover 11 of the 15 suppliers they use and can get the other four on board. “Instead of (the chef) dealing with 15 suppliers with SMS, email et cetera, it is one,’’ says Nathan.
Food Orbit boasts clients including Bucket List at Bondi Beach and Three Blue Ducks in Bronte and has ambitions to make it a national service.
But for the moment it is about getting what he calls the “product-market fit’’ right.
“It is very easy to build up vanity metrics, by how many customers have you got, how much traffic you have got on your site,’’ he said. “But for us, we would much rather have 10 customers buying 100 per cent of their produce on our site than 100 restaurants purchasing 10 per cent of the menu because that is proving the business model to where funding can help you grow and scale it.’’
Venture capital investor Mark Carnegie has established a $120m venture capital pool from a combined $60m provided through the federal government’s Innovation Investment Fund, matched with his own and other investors’ money.
Carnegie hopes to use the next Den event in May — to be held in the converted Darlinghurst church where he lives — to uncover another round of appealing start-up prospects that can be funded by his group or other investors in the room.
Source: The Australian - 2 April 2014
