INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Sourcing ingredients in the restaurant industry is a dirty process that still relies heavily on voicemails and fax orders
More tech-forward solutions have been pushed, but getting restaurants and suppliers to uniformly sign on to a platform has been a relatively
daunting challenge.Choco is a young startup with plenty of momentum that’s aiming to attract restaurants and suppliers to their mobile
ordering platform, which gives restaurants their very own food delivery app for getting ingredients from suppliers, moving them away from
daily voicemail orders.“[Leaving voicemails] a very tedious process and one that’s very prone to error but [restaurants] are going to
repeat it every day,” Choco CEO Daniel Khachab tells TechCrunch
“This ‘system’ is highly inefficient and wasteful, but it’s our main competitor.”Choco’s mobile app has an interface reminiscent
of popular consumer apps, with a Messenger-like chat interface for communication between suppliers and restaurants and a Postmates-like
ordering list that makes ordering as easy as tapping away on one’s commonly purchased ingredients.There’s a big opportunity here, and
Khachab has been growing the Choco team at breakneck speeds to ensure that it is the solution to beat
The 18-month-old team has 100 employees already and is announcing that they’ve closed a $33.5 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture
By the end of next year the company hopes to grow its business by 15x.Choco is in 15 cities across Europe and the U.S
and says their early customers include everyone from Michelin-starred restaurants to burger chains
The company has now raised $41 million to date
Other investors include Atlantic Labs, Target Global, Visionaries Club and Greyhound.As the company seeks to build up a user base among
suppliers and restaurants keen to build out their networks, Choco currently isn’t monetizing its users
Khachab tells me the team is developing premium subscription features that will likely focus on monetizing suppliers’ abilities to reach
restaurants and communicate with them about new offerings.Khachab sees Choco’s solutions as one that makes restaurant/suppliers
relationships better but also takes a step toward solving the broader problem of food waste in the restaurant industry
Better communication and analytics that aren’t on the back of a napkin mean more precise ordering that can prevent both sides from
overstocking, increasing efficiency but also preserving resources
Khachab notes that estimates say that 30-40% of food produced each year is wasted and that nearly three-quarters of that waste happens in
the supply chain before consumers are involved.
