With the Homemeal app, private individuals can sell their home-cooked dishes. The startup from Berlin takes care of everything else. And now gets millions.
Who hasn’t thought that grandma’s potato pancakes could just as easily be served in a restaurant? Or even your own rice bowl, which is almost too good for the photo on Instagram. The Berlin food start-up Homemeal made this idea of professionally marketing homemade food its business model in 2021. Similar to the Ghost Kitchens concept, amateur chefs can register with the platform, prepare their best dishes in their private kitchen and offer them legally via the app. The hot food can then be brought to the customer by courier, as with the delivery services Wolt and Uber Eats.
The startup has now been able to convince the first investors with its app. The founders Martin Andreas Schmidt and Mario Dugonik recently raised a seven-figure sum of venture capital in one round. The Rhineland family office Longfield Invest and the smaller investment companies Aeronaut Invest, Matt Invest 1 Ltd. participated as lead investors. and Nowhatch Ventures from Frankfurt.
The Homemeal founders want to use the money for their expansion into major German cities. After Berlin, the app for private chefs will also be launched in Munich and Hamburg in the coming months. By the end of 2023, Schmidt and Dugonik plan “to be active with our big home-made mission in all German-speaking cities with over a million inhabitants.”
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Over 100 hobby chefs now offer home-cooked food for sale at Homemeal. The start-up advertises that the gastronomic market will become even more diverse thanks to previously inaccessible food providers and that private individuals can thus make the dream of a restaurant possible in their own home without high investments. These are, for example, full-time parents, students, but also trained chefs who cook traditional dishes from Indian, Korean, Thai or Ghanaian cuisine and earn something extra.
More waiting time: Delivery orders at Homemeal need one day in advance
To ensure that homemeal chefs do not move in the gray area of ghost kitchens, the startup creates legal clarity by ensuring that the legal and hygienic requirements are met in private kitchens. It also helps app providers with business registration and registration with the tax office. Anyone who wants to offer home-cooked specialties can register on the startup’s website. The startup then asks for important data, such as the address, previous experience in the kitchen, the five best dishes and how often a week someone would like to offer their dishes. Once a profile is created, users can order food. You can either pick it up yourself at the restaurant apartment or have the dishes delivered to you.
The biggest difference to existing food delivery services is probably the waiting time – spontaneous is not always possible. Because users who do not want to pick up themselves must order at least one day in advance so that the hobby cooks have enough time to shop and prepare. In addition, the dishes in the private kitchen are first chilled before they are taken to a logistics center run by the startup, from where the orders are delivered to the customers. According to the company, around 50,000 users in Berlin use the ordering app today. Over 18,000 home-made orders are said to have been served so far.
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