Name: The Foraging Fox

Legal Name: The Foraging Fox Ltd

Location: London, UK

Founded: 2013

Founders: Desiree Parker and Frankie Fox

Website: https://www.foragingfox.com/

Social Media Following: 2,630 followers on Facebook, 3,348 followers on Twitter, 101 followers on LinkedIn, 3618 followers on Instagram

Industry – Global Natural Food and Drinks Market

Size: $79.1B in 2016 (Source: Allied Market Research)

Projections: $191.9B by 2023, CAGR of 13.7% 

Introduction

The Foraging Fox crafts a range of homemade ketchup – a bold take on the classic condiment – by giving it their classic twist. The range of mayos are crafted using British free-range eggs, fewer ingredients and have no added sugar. The company currently sells its products both online and offline across more than 4 countries in Europe.

The Product

What started off as a way to use up a bumper harvest of beetroots transformed into a creative condiment company. The Foraging Fox now serves a range of all-natural, gluten-free products such as hot beetroot ketchup, smoked garlic mayo, spicy turmeric mayo, etc.

The Foraging Fox Beetroot Ketchup was launched in 2014 and has won multiple awards for taste and innovation and is now available globally including a listing in Walmart across the USA. 

The company kickstarted in 2015 and by the end of 2016, their range of ketchup found their way online and in specialty stores across the UK. By 2018, the condiments had made their supermarket debuts in the UK, Germany, Holland, Canada, and the United States.

Origin and Founding Team

A graduate of the London School of Economics, Desiree Parker has been serving as CEO since October 2014. Prior to this, she had stints at Barclays, Ingenious Media Plc. etc.

Co-founder and Head of Innovation, Frankie Fox comes with a sound background in law. The Foraging Fox is named after her late father, Dr. Roland Fox, who instilled a love for foraging, food, and nature in her.

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Legal: Citispoon LLC

Location: Chicago, IL

Founded: 2014

Founder(s): Dapo Kolawole and Ola Kolawole

Website: http://citispoon.com/

Social Media: 393 followers on Facebook, 293 followers on Instagram, 109 followers on Twitter, 51 followers on LinkedIn

Industry: Hospitality SaaS

Projections: $60.36B at a CAGR of 9% from 2019 to 2023 (Business Wire)

Introduction

Chicago-based Citispoon helps customers by giving them smart dining suggestions while assisting restaurants in leveraging location-based intelligence to drive traffic. A dining app with personalized answers to the question, “Where do we eat now,” Citispoon leverages its proprietary algorithm to understand diners’ taste buds and recommend closest restaurants available with the least wait-times. It also helps local restaurants remain competitive by strategically placing advertisements using location-based analytics and real-world customer behavior data to increase conversions. 

The Product

Citispoon is a mobile-based Software as a Solution (SaaS) subscription platform that allows restaurants to update real-time information about their current wait-times to potential customers. By setting clear expectations on wait-times, the platform helps restaurants reduce patron walk-away and improve the dining experience.

Through the platform, restaurants gain data-driven insights about customers, their taste preferences, and real-world behavior. Such information aids restaurants to understand, interact, and engage with their customers better and build long-term relationships.  The platform also provides location-based data analytics to restaurants to enhance the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. Leveraging its proprietary algorithm, Citispoon strategically places digital advertisements to target the right group of customers for the restaurant. Citispoon adopts location-based data to leverage existing Global Information Systems (GIS) to enhance the reach of the restaurants by showing ads to people who are most likely to convert. 

Citispoon brings the logic of the Waze app to dining. The app uses machine learning to understand diner preferences and taste buds and matches it with wait-times at restaurants. Diners receive personal recommendations of restaurants where they are most likely to enjoy the experience without having to wait too long. The app personalizes the search for good food, helps diners make quick decisions about where to eat, and improves the overall dining experience. 

Focusing on the fundamentally broken aspect of dining experiences, the wait times, Citispoon resolves the pain of choosing restaurants without knowing how long a wait it will be to get a table. With a mission to help patrons save valuable time, the app is designed to inform them of the potential wait-time before leaving for the restaurant, thereby allowing customers to spend time on what matters instead of waiting for a table. 

Origin and Founding Team

Citispoon was founded in 2014 in Iowa by Dapo Kolawole and Ola Kolawole. The concept originated from a ‘hangry’ experience the founders encountered one evening in Davenport, Iowa. Both of them being ardent food-lovers craved to taste something new but ended up receiving one-hour waits at several restaurants instead. Exhausted from the overall experience during that meal, they conceived the idea for  Citispoon with an intent to revolutionize the app-to-table dining experience for food connoisseurs everywhere. 

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Dapo Kolawole was a lead product design engineer. Passionate about engineering, Dapo Kolawale endeavors to find opportunities to introduce product design engineering to young minority engineers. Ola Kolawale was a family physician before beginning her entrepreneurial journey with Citispoon. 

The founders believe that long waitlists tend to ruin dining experiences immensely. Waiting in line in crowded lobbies or walking from one restaurant to another, hoping to be seated, eats into diner’s quality time. With a vision to transform dining experiences, Citispoon was conceptualized to help restaurants remain competitive while also improving the customer’s overall experience.

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Name: Rise Products

Legal: Rise Product Inc.

Location: New York City, New York

Founded: 2016

Founder(s): Jessica Aguirre, Ashwin Gopi, Bertha Jimenez, and Lev Tatz

Website: www.riseproducts.co 

Social Media: 464 Likes on Facebook, 224 Followers on LinkedIn, 435 Followers on Twitter

Industry – Organic Food Market

Size: $52.5 billion in 2018, (Source: Organic Industry Survey by Organic Trade Association, USA)

Introduction

Rise Products upcycles spent barley from local craft breweries around Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, into an organic, nutritious flour. The spent grains in breweries that are rich in fiber and protein but were previously wasted now get converted into various products by Rise, using their patent-pending dehydration and milling technology. 

The Product

RISE Products offers three core products currently – Barley Flour, Barley Flour Dark Edition, and upcycled Brownie Mix. According to its website, barley flour has 12 times the fiber, twice the protein and 1/3 of the carbs of traditional flour. All their products are 100% organic and processed through traditional methods by being ground, milled and sifted — all by hand. While their primary focus is business with B2B, they have started selling to individuals through their website.

Barley contains less gluten than wheat, therefore, it works better with foods that don’t need to rise much, like biscuits or bread. Currently, they are tying up with local chefs and bakers to develop new ingredients and recipes that are sustainable. Their long-term goal is to apply their patent-pending technology to recycling food waste at a larger scale.

Origin and Founding Team

Co-Founder & CEO, Bertha Jimenez, first thought of recycling beer waste, i.e. the spent grains, while working on her doctorate in 2015 at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University. Her goal was to find ways to reduce industrial waste, and Brooklyn’s craft breweries presented a ready opportunity. Soon, Jimenez along with co-founder Jessica Aguirre, a graduate in Management and Systems from NYU and COO Ashwin Gopi, a PhD in Technology Management, had visited several breweries in the area, consulted several chefs and came upon producing flour as the way they would upcycle the spent grains.  

The start-up also offers consultancy to partners to help them become zero waste businesses as well as reduce their operational costs and contribute to more circular production models. 

The founders — who hail from Ecuador, Lithuania, India and other nations wish to bring the technology to such countries to help reduce industrial food waste and promote sustainable models of business. 

Performance and Trends

Between 2017 and now, the company has raised over $150k in funding from Food-X,  Laudato Si’ Challenge, and venture capital firm SOSV.

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Name: Sunbox

Legal Name: Sunbox Inc

Location: Los Angeles, California

Founded: 2015

Founder(s): Vanessa Ballesteros and Elisa Gomez

Website: https://sunboxmarket.com/

Social Media Following: 134 Likes on Facebook, 325 Followers on Twitter, 5145 Followers on Instagram 

INDUSTRY – Food Tech

Size: $357M in 2018 (Source: MarketWatch)

Projections: $145.64B by 2025, by 2025 (CAGR of 12%) (Source: MarketWatch)

Introduction

Sunbox is a food tech company that offers smart kiosks with organic, vegan, and locally sourced foods, snacks, and beverages to make healthy eating affordable and convenient through technology. 

The Product 

Sunbox provides smart kiosks which come with a curated selection of organic food items and beverages with options that include vegan, gluten-free, paleo, soy-free, nut-free, grain-free, raw, non-GMO and kosher. It offers its kiosks to organizations, hospitals, schools, gyms, as well as residences. Sunbox partners with local beverage and food makers to regularly stock their kiosks with a variety of healthy foods. 

Underlining its focus on being an environmentally conscious company, Sunbox uses recycled wood to build its kiosks and smarter in-built mechanisms ensure lower energy consumption than conventional vending machines. The kiosks have a touch screen that allows customers to view information such as ingredients and nutrition facts about each food item. Once a customer decides what they want, they can add it to their virtual shopping cart and then check out using either a credit card or through the Sunbox mobile app. 

Origin and Founding Team 

Sunbox was founded by Vanessa Ballesteros and Elisa Gomez in 2015. 

Vanessa is an Emmy Award-winning television producer with producing credits for shows such as Hell’s Kitchen, The Amazing Race, and Survivor under her belt. Elisa has spent over a decade as an operations management professional with experience in customer service, relationship building. She has previously worked at Well Fargo for over a decade across multiple roles and later as the business manager at a fashion e-commerce retailer in LA. 

As someone who would spend days traveling for work and keeping odd hours while working on projects, Vanessa was tired of the processed and sugar-rich foods offered in the name of healthy snacks. She approached her friend, Elisa Gomez, who had a similar idea almost at the same time for a convenient way to eat healthy while on the go based on her own experience of juggling a hectic schedule and trying to maintain healthy eating habits. Seeking to make health foods quickly and easily available to people, the two collaborated to create Sunbox. 

Performance and Trends

In May 2018, Sunbox Inc. was chosen to be a part of LA Cleantech Incubator’s maiden cohort of the Founders Business Accelerator program developed with the City of Los Angeles.

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