Catering marketplace FoodByUs raises $12 million in Series B

Wholesale hospitality marketplace FoodByUs has raised $12 million in a Series B.

The round was led by South African VC Base Capital, supported by New York’s  FJ Labs, and Trawalla Group, plus with follow-on funding from founding investor Macquarie Capital.

FoodByUs previously raised $10 million in a Series A in November 2021 and then spent 12 months putting the Series B round together.

The six-year-old marketplace, founded by Ben Lipschitz, former Menulog MD Tim Chandler and Gary Munitz, connects restaurants, cafes and caterers with thousands of wholesale food and alcohol suppliers. In late 2021, FoodByUs introduced a new tech feature, “add your own supplier”, which saw the platform’s  supplier network grow by 10-fold in less than 12 months.

Lipschitz, the company’s CEO, said they’d seen strong growth over the last 12 months as diners returned to post-lockdown restaurants, including a 200% increase in suppliers using the platform, alongside the headcount doubling to 85.

“FoodByUs was built on the premise of improving the often overlooked ‘back of house’ function within hospitality venues. Procurement time and costs are one third of a venue’s expenses yet are often where the profit is made – or lost,” he said

“In the past few years alone we have helped independent restaurants and cafes save close to $16 million in costs and 2,643,750 hours in time ordering.”

Lipschitz said launching a wholesale food marketplace was a novel idea in 2016 and it took some time to prove value for both sides.

:We’re now in a high growth phase and are completely focused on building an incredibly high quality software product, without which independent venues simply could not operate,” he said.

“We’re already the leading solution in our market, this round will help cement FoodByUs as the dominant hospitality procurement tech in Australia.”

FoodByUs allows independent venues to search and compare hundreds of thousands of products, with transparent and consistent pricing, no credit applications and the purchasing power of a much larger businesses.

Base Capital founder Paul Rutherford said praised the FoodByUs leadership team as “exceptional” and a leading factor in what drew them to the business.

“We were also drawn to the combination of operating software with an open marketplace delivering an innovative approach to how restaurants and food suppliers manage their businesses,” he said.

“Supporting this is a very strong growth trajectory along with excellent engagement and retention of customers.”