Tastewise secures $17M to serve AI-driven decision making to the food & beverage industry. With a customer base including Fortune 500 F&B brands Nestle, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Campbell’s, and JustEgg, Tastewise will use the new funding to further global expansion
$17M Series A Funding for Tastewise
Tastewise, the AI-powered platform that helps food brands bring products to market based on consumer data, has announced that it has raised $17M in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Disruptive AI, who joins existing investors PeakBridge and PICO Venture Partners and brings Tastewise’s total funding to $21.5M to date. Tastewise’s broad customer base spans food and beverage companies from Fortune 500s — such as Nestle, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, and Campbell’s — to industry newcomers like JustEgg.
Following rapid growth and tripled revenues with its flagship insights and analytics AI platform, Tastewise will use this new funding to expand into new markets including Canada, Australia, Germany, France, and India. Tastewise is the leading provider of food delivery analytics that helps food brands connect with restaurants across multiple geographies.
Revolutionising How People Eat & Drink
These solutions are timely and urgent; the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a massive revolution in the ways people eat and drink. Today, 25% more people are interested in sustainable food, and 33% more people eat and drink for functional wellness, than in 2021. Today’s eaters and drinkers are more informed, more demanding, and above all, more digital. Based on the current rate of change in both consumer needs and food and beverage innovation, Tastewise data indicates that most of what we eat today will change significantly over the next decade. The old ways of measuring trends and behavior in the food industry, such as surveys and focus groups, are unable to capture the full picture of today’s changing market — nor the trends that define it.
Since its inception in 2017, Tastewise’s mission has been to provide the food industry with data-driven solutions for new product development, marketing, and foodservice sales. Tastewise enables the food industry to discover new flavors and product ideas, develop content for marketing campaigns, and find sales opportunities with restaurants and retail by fusing billions of data points across social media, recipes, and restaurant menus.
Using proprietary AI and the food and beverage industry’s largest available dataset, Tastewise accurately predicted the rise of several trends that have influenced eating and drinking during the COVID years — including:
- The rise of health as a driver for plant-based: Today, health is 2.4x more important than animal welfare for plant-based eating.
- The rise of functional health: 33% more consumers eat food and beverage for functional benefit since the beginning of 2021.
- The influence of digitalisation on how, when, and what people eat: 19% of all US restaurants are on all 3 major delivery platforms, and 63% of all US restaurants changed their online menus in the last month.
“We’re incredibly excited to partner with Tastewise because of the tremendous impact they have already demonstrated on the food and beverage industry and the potential we see for AI to become a key ingredient in the industry’s resilience in the foreseen future,” said Izhar Shay, former Israeli Minister of Science & Technology and today a Venture Partner at Disruptive AI.
