Meal planner startup Kitchenful raises $1.9M from VentureFriends, Goodwater Capital and Jabbar

With the pandemic turning us into delivery experts, consumers have also switched on to meal kits in droves, given that it combines both delivery and home cooking. But many meal kits can be inflexible.

The Kitchenful startup in Germany realized this and so it allows users to browse recipes from food bloggers and have personalized meal plans created, adjustable to preferences and dietary requirements. Kitchenful’s other offering is that it tries to be affordable as well, as we wrote earlier this year.

After going through the Y Combinator Summer 2021 program, it has now raised a $1.9 million funding round from VentureFriends, Goodwater Capital and Jabbar Internet Group.

Previous investors include Y Combinator and angels such as Valentin Stalf (co-founder and CEO of N26), Samih Toukan (co-founder at Souq), David Fischer (HighSnobiety), Maik Ludewig (MD of DurstExpress), and Victor Henning (co-founder of Mendeley).

Co-founders Chris Schiller and Christian Hartung now plan to expand into the EU and North America.

Schiller previously spent four years as vice president of Product at Hello Fresh, and both he and Hartung were formerly at Rocket Internet.

Schiller said:

We believe that cooking at home should be simple, fun and personal. However in today’s world “What’s for dinner” is still a nerve-wracking question, and grocery shopping costs millions of people time and energy every single day. We are fixing this with our new service and the ambition to become the leading brand for cooking at home in the United States and Europe.

Apostolos Apostolakis, co-founder and partner at VentureFriends, said: “Online grocery is currently being disrupted and we see a trend of commoditization of delivery services itself which makes the adjacent layers that help to decide what to actually buy ever more relevant. With the founders’ highly relevant backgrounds Kitchenful is in a promising position to become a leading brand in the cook-at-home space.”

Kitchenful is likely to meet stiff opposition from other new players in this space such as Lollipop.