HomeCooks

Idea

Introduction

HomeCooks is the Etsy of food.

We are on a mission to rebuild the UK's broken £12.6bn food delivery industry. For food operators, it relies on low paid labour, poor working conditions and razor thin margins. This translates through to customers with increasingly expensive & unhealthy takeaways.

At HomeCooks, we connect our independent food creators directly to consumers, so they can work flexibly to create the food we love. From our experience, this is one of the most profitable things they can do in the industry.

How it works is simple. Our independent food creators make their very best meals in batches and send them to our warehouse. We simply freeze, store and distribute on their behalf.

The result is that our happy eaters get to benefit from an ever-growing selection of 200+ home cooked meals that cost less than the average meal from mainstream food delivery companies.

Similar businesses in the US have closed large funding rounds: Shef ($90m+ raised in total) & CookUnity ($47m raised).

Monetisation strategy

As a marketplace, we take a commission from the food creator on every meal sold through our website. Additionally there are also a few charges for the end user (including a delivery fee).

Our model is designed with our food creators in mind: by batch cooking 100+ dishes at a time, our experience shows us that HomeCooks is one of the most profitable ways to produce food in the industry.

If a chef cooks over 130 portions in each batch, then can earn on average £1,000 per batch they send to us (this equates to about 1-2 days worth of work!). For most of our chefs, HomeCooks is the only way they can deliver their food nationwide.

We believe that we can compete across three industries:

- The £12bn UK food delivery industry, by offering cheaper meals with more coverage across the UK. (see Deliveroo, UberEats).

- The $1.5bn UK meal kit industry, by offering higher choice and higher convenience than a meal-kit provider. (see Gousto, Hello Fresh).

- The $15bn Ready to Eat Meal industry, by offering higher choice and, in our opinion, higher quality (see Cook, AllPlants).