It’s exciting times in our business right now. We now have over 50,000 Kiwi and Australian consumers using our platform to plan, shop & cook, and have recently rebranded from MenuAid to Appetise. With our rebrand, we now offer our meal planning platform to consumers for free, as our team delivers on our mission to bring affordable nutritious meals to as many people as possible.
We are also scaling up our ‘Appetise Insights’ arm as we work with an increasing number of FMCG companies, helping them understand real consumer behaviour in real time.
Our Appetise Founder & CEO Toby Hilliam says the investment is a recognition of the immense opportunity to provide more current and realistic data to an FMCG industry, where this information can be often expensive, cumbersome, and unreliable.
“Until very recently, FMCG brands have made huge business decisions based on claimed data found in U&A studies and survey panels. We have created an accessible, real-time and reliable data source built with real shopper behaviour, so businesses can make better informed decisions,” said Hilliam.
“By helping Kiwis with all aspects of the dinner time process, from buying, to cooking, to eating, we’re getting an amazing understanding of our shoppers' behaviours and the key drivers for making decisions. For Appetise Insights clients like Lee Kum Kee and Fonterra, these insights have been invaluable in developing marketing strategies that get to the heart of what consumers want, allowing them to make the products that their shoppers love.”
For FMCG brand leaders, the insights have been meaningful for understanding the who, what & why behind consumer decisions, Hilliam said.
“It is a sad reality that over 90% of new food products fail. While we can point blame at the fast moving food trends, it also comes back to brands’ inability to understand what consumers really want. If we can help businesses get access to better information, we’re going to see happier shoppers and a more sustainable FMCG sector,” Hilliam said.
For our business,, the rebrand is aimed broadly across the New Zealand and Australian shopper base, who are largely looking for delicious, affordable meal options.
As a consumer brand, we have already become an essential part of the Kiwi and Aussie mealtimes, providing custom recipe recommendations, and a simple process to order their groceries through its platform.
By ditching our $4 weekly subscription, we are expecting to see a large growth in our user base, allowing Appetise Insights even better understanding into what Kiwis and Aussies are eating.
Icehouse Ventures’ Principal Mason Bleakley says the our successful raise is a recognition of a business with a clear growth direction, solving a pressing problem.
“Appetise has its eye on two distinct problems which are the flipside of the same coin. How consumers plan for dinner, and how producers are giving them the stuff these shoppers really want to buy. With very little initial investment they have managed to build a company that solves these two entrenched problems in a genuine way. The new capital should help Appetise raise the bar, yet again, to become inseparable from the Australian and New Zealand mealtime,” said Bleakley.
For OIF Ventures investor Oliver Darwin, Appetise represented an opportunity to partner with an exceptionally high quality founding team, playing in a massive market that is ripe for disruption.
"We have been tracking Elise and Toby for the last two years, and over this time, they have consistently delivered on all of their promises. Not only have they built a fantastic product that addresses a significant pain point for consumers but the insights they're able to deliver to FMCG brands are incredibly valuable across a range of use cases, and they're something these brands have never had access to before. We can't wait to see the impact that an innovative solution like Appetise's can have in a space currently dominated by large, slow-moving and expensive incumbents and we're absolutely fizzing (to use an Appetise term) to be partnering with Elise, Toby, and the entire Appetise team as they tackle the Australian market and beyond."
Now an expansion of the business sees us pushing to become a data powerhouse and marketing insights platform for the food and beverage industry.
The $4 million raise will primarily be used to scale globally, with a focus on Australia, the UK and Asia, and to add to its already impressive client list of global food businesses, Hilliam said.
“For consumers, Appetise will only be better than before. We’re pushing forward on the same mission to make it easier for consumers to eat healthy, save money and reduce the stress of their grocery shop. For producers of food in New Zealand and Australia, they’re going to have better information on what things their shoppers want to eat.”
Sources
