Digital Dining and Delights: Exploring Online Menus and Food Delivery
Greetings, Pulse Subscribers!
Lots of food news this week, so be sure not to read on an empty stomach! Here’s the agenda:
Less is more in grocery delivery
Restaurant menus written by AI
Making spam delicious
Are you eating your veggies?
All this plus a full-stack marketing solution and how TikTok is kicking off the holiday shopping wars early this year.
Dig in!
Startup Deals
Online Grocery Delivery | Sometimes you have to scale down to blow up—at least, that’s the strategy for online grocery delivery startup JOKR. After overexpanding, JOKR recently pulled out of the US and some Latin American markets to focus exclusively on Brazil. With a smaller footprint, JOKR no longer needs to subsidize any of its grocery orders, and it now boasts gross profit above 25%. And while its competitors usually offer between 1,500 to 2,500 products, JOKR sells north of 10,000 products to the Brazilian market. Although this strategic move did contribute to a drop in valuation from $1.3 billion in February to $800 million today, JOKR’s clearer path to profitability has raised interest from retail incumbents and venture investors. Hence the company’s recent $50 million Series D led by Convivialité Ventures, the investment arm of Pernod Ricard, and joined by blue-chip investors G Squared and Greycroft.
Restaurant Digitization | Creating and maintaining an online presence for restaurants certainly feels like a crowded space these days, but Superorder offers new tools to make digital transformation easier than ever. Sure, Superorder has the usual tools for online presence, order and financial management, and demand analytics, but what separates it from the pack is the use of generative AI for online storefronts. Restaurants can build a website through a natural language-based interface by typing in a query like “Build me a website for an Italian restaurant in New York” and then picking a design template. What’s more, Superorder’s AI can create on-brand descriptions and even photos for every item on an online menu. While pushing into a crowded field, Superorder is generating much interest and recently raised $10 million in a Series A led by Foundation Capital.
AI Marketing | With more and more marketers turning to AI to enhance their in-house efforts, startup Pixis has entered the market with a full-stack solution. The Pixis platform can be divided into three core pillars: targeting, creative, and performance. With targeting, Pixis uses AI to categorize audiences and identify targets for a given brand, product, or ad campaign. In creative, Pixis uses AI to generate text and image assets. And when it comes to performance, Pixis offers automated ad bidding and budget-pacing tools that attempt to mitigate the impact of short-term fluctuations and seasonality. For Pixis, the numbers speak for themselves. The company crossed the $50 million mark in annual recurring revenue this quarter thanks to a customer base of 200+ brands, including DHL, Joe & The Juice, and Sears. Having grown 140% year over year in 2023, Pixis raised an $85 million Series C led by Touring Capital.
Shopping Email | While custom apps in retail have been all the rage, something retro that never stopped are emails. From the consumer’s perspective, knowing which emails provide value and which are spam is next to impossible. Imagine if consumers had a custom email address that was crafted exclusively to help them get value out of overlooked messages. That’s the idea behind Flash! Instead of trying to unify a million apps, Flash is designed to unify order management, brand communication, and retail rewards in a single inbox and handpick the relevant emails containing discounts and cash-back offers from all the places you love. The emails aren’t gonna stop, so Flash is here to help consumers cut through the noise. Flash recently raised $7 million in a pre-Series A led by Blume Ventures and existing investor PeerCapital.
Essential Reads
This year, the holiday shopping wars will officially commence on October 27, when TikTok begins a campaign to boost its online marketplace, TikTok Shop, by subsidizing up-to-50-percent discounts for shoppers. This short yet essential read takes a look at how the video-sharing platform is attempting to get a foothold against market leaders like Amazon and Walmart prior to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the traditional holiday shopping season.
Read more about the TikTok holiday discount here.
We all know we need to eat more fruits and veggies, but how much is enough? This intriguing read looks at how some 7-Eleven stores in Japan have recently introduced Vege-Check—a device that essentially reads your palm to measure carotenoid levels in your skin and figure out how much fruit and veg you’ve been eating! By showing consumers what they need nutritionally before they hit the grocery aisles, Vege-Check could alter the way people shop.
Learn more about Vege-Check here.