Back in Haarlem, I used to live right next to this elderly woman with Indonesian roots, Joyce. Occasionally, Joyce would hand out snacks from her homeland: fried fish dumplings, vegetable fritters or Serabi, a pancake-like snack with rice flour and shredded coconut. If you were really lucky, you would catch Joyce making her own beef rendang. Now I am not usually the type to exaggerate (I am) but believe me when I tell you that, to this day, her beef rendang is the single greatest dish I’ve ever eaten

Joyce didn’t ask anything in return for her dishes, but people generously paid her whatever they felt it was worth. On a good day (her rendang day), she’d pull in ~500 EUR. Not bad.

Now I am not telling you this because I am being sponsored by Joyce. That wouldn’t be possible because I don’t really like to write sponsored content and Joyce passed away 10 years ago. However, Joyce’s rendang does serve as a neat primer to our recent investment in HomeCooks — and we’re very excited to share some notes on why we think Josh and his team are perfectly seasoned to grill the competition (too corny? Yeah maybe…)

Cookin’ up for perfection

HomeCooks is a marketplace that connects food creators and amateur chefs to a hungry audience. Think of it like Etsy for homemade food. Via HomeCooks, users can pick from a wide selection of dishes, ranging from lentil soup to Lithuanian meat balls and — you guessed it — beef rendang. If only Joyce could see this!

Yes — the food and food delivery space is a crowded one. Different models (traditional aggregator platforms, meal kits, almost-ready-to-eat solutions, ghost/cloud kitchen concepts and farm-to-table delivery) exist, yet their offering is either eroding the already-razor-thin margins for the supply side (e.g chefs, restaurant owners, farmers etc) or putting a significant strain on the wallets of the demand side — and that’s just one of the many reasons why we think the space can use a good stir. But hey, at least I can always BNPL my sandwich!

Solving scalability issues through cross-border dispatch

Many food delivery marketplaces like the ones mentioned above are often challenged on their scalability as they are naturally limited in their geographical coverage. These local constraints seriously pressure the already flimsy unit economics, as aggregators like Uber Eats & Deliveroo need to continuously rebuild their marketplace whenever they venture into a new city. After all, existing supply could not bring on new demand and vice versa. In other words: scaling into new areas didn’t bring down acquisition costs.

HomeCooks doesn’t face this problem as they work on consignment with frozen food. Dishes are collected in bulk and brought to a central hub where they are flash-frozen and packaged. The fact that the dishes are frozen might sound insignificant, but actually solves many of the scalability issues that these larger aggregators face. Without the time pressure of delivering perishable and fresh food, HomeCooks can now reach a much wider audience, enabling the company to leverage cross-nation network effects to massive extend its reach e.g. someone from the Northern part of Scotland can now enjoy beef rendang made by someone from London. Bòidheach!

Competing on more than just price

Since the chefs on HomeCooks are not dealing with high capex and overhead costs that are usually associated with running a restaurant — all you need are two Food & Safety certificates and a kitchen — and cook their dishes in batches, prices are very reasonable — especially for London standards. But price is not the only value driver.

Apart from convenience and arguably taste (Reyansh for instance makes a killer butter chicken for 1/3 of the price of your ‘local’ takeout), HomeCooks also competes with the more established platforms on variety , which is a particularly powerful value-driver in non-urban areas. Less densely populated areas are often only serviced by platforms that aggregate the offering of local restaurants, which means that you only get to pick from your local pizzeria, kebab shop or Sushi place. And that’s if you’re lucky. With HomeCooks, people from all over the country can pick from 100+ dishes. More burritos more bliss!

Microbrands = lower CAC distribution

Even if you are not into food or cooking, there is a fat chance you’ve come across viral videos of oven-baked feta pasta, smash burgers, fried chicken or breakfast burritos. Content on food consistently ranks as one of the most popular categories, with creators or foodfluencers (not my favorite word either) reaching hundreds of millions of people daily. Personal favourites like Thomas Straker, WhatWillyCook, Maunika Gowardhan and French Guy Cooking cleverly turned their dishes into products through merchandise, cookbooks, kitchen gear or even their own branded sticks of butter.

Tailwinded by the COVID stay-at-home cook-outs, we saw an entirely new generation of chefs standing up: students, freelancers, office 9-to5’s, grandmas or even your Indonesian neighbour (looking at you Joyce!) HomeCooks can give these not-so-amateur-chefs the tools, network and reach that enable them to not only show the world what they can make but also to sell their dishes to the millions of people who are drooling behind their screens. Much like how Patreon helped millions of podcast makers, video creators and other digital natives build loyalty and receive support from their following, we see HomeCooks as the platform that empowers food creators of any kind to go beyond just static content.

This community-centred playbook is a great way to lower CAC as HomeCooks can now indirectly engage with the pre-existing fanbase of the foodcreators. We’ve seen this happening with popular microbrands like Tom’s award-winning Sichuan chilli oil, Willy’s pies and the guys making everything from Boeuf Bourguignon to Taragon Chicken at FieldGoods. Before HomeCooks, these independent food creators had to build up their own sales channels and acquisition strategies, which is notoriously tricky if you are only offering a single product and cannot rely on network effects to grow organically. HomeCooks solves this by offering these chefs a plug-and-play and scalable sales channel, as marketplace dynamics cause more demand to be drawn to the platform as supply increases and vice versa.

The future is HomeCooks

I can spend many more Medium posts about why I am personally excited about HomeCooks. Whether that is for a yet unexplored B2B(2C) (think canteen offerings or even vending machines!) angle, enhanced workflow solutions for the chefs (CRM, recipe management, direct marketing tools), loyalty programs or cooking workshops/training, there is still a lot to look out for.

With Josh having previously exited 2 other food businesses (including one exit to Just Eat!) I don’t doubt for a second that HomeCooks will eat anyone who tries to challenge. But please don’t just take my word for it, try for yourself. I recommend starting with the beef rendang.

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