Dishpatch Scales Meal-at-Home Services, Expands Partner List

Need to Know

• The London-based meal kit delivery service will expand its offerings after picking up more than £10 million in seed funding.
• Dishpatch will add an additional 20 restaurants to its roster, which already includes 25 restaurants across London.
• The “finish-at-home” service allows customers to receive fully-prepared restaurant meals from top eateries including Ottolenghi and St. JOHN.

Analysis

Dishpatch, the London-based “finish-at-home” meal delivery company, plans to almost double the number of restaurants available to users of the service, after picking up more than £10 million in seed funding recently.

Dishpatch raised €11.6 million in a round of funding led by venture capital firms LocalGlobe and Andreessen Horowitz. The company, which currently offers exclusive meal kits from 25 top restaurants across London, plans to add another 20 restaurants to its roster by the end of 2021.

“Dining at home should be flavourful, meaningful, and exciting, a departure from the everyday and generic takeaway,” Dishpatch CEO and co-founder Peter Butler said in a statement. “Dishpatch creates an entirely new and profitable revenue stream for restaurants while enabling access to high-quality menus no matter where you live. We’re giving the best chefs bigger tables, hand-selecting both award-winners and hidden gems yet to be discovered.”

Dishpatch, which was founded in 2020, positions itself as the “antithesis” of food delivery companies such as Deliveroo and UberEats. The service provides fully prepared, exclusive meals to customers, which are then handed over to the Dishpatch fulfillment team and delivered once a week, on Friday — as opposed to meal kits that require assembly, or more fast-casual takeout items. Meals can be customized to serve just two diners or scaled up to accommodate larger gatherings.

Dishpatch’s current restaurant partners include some of the top restaurants in London, including. St. JOHN and Ottolenghi (though deliveries are made across the UK).

The company was founded in 2020, in an effort to assist restaurants that were struggling due to the COVID-19 lockdowns — especially those whose prix fixe and fine dining options did not necessarily immediately translate to takeout. Dishpatch has delivered more than 75,000 meals in the 10 months since it was founded, and 95% of the restaurants using its platform had never delivered food before.

More than 50% of Dishpatch diners are repeat customers, while more than 70% of orders are made more than a week in advance. In addition, 75% of Dishpatch customers order meals from restaurants they’ve never been to before.

The meal kit and food delivery industries have seen enormous growth since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as widespread lockdown measures prevented restaurants from serving guests in-house. HelloFresh, the Berlin-based meal kit service, saw 122.6% year-over-year revenue growth in Q2 of 2020, while Gousto, the UK-based meal kit service, saw sales spike by 129% last year. UberEats, meanwhile, reported $4.8 billion in revenue in 2020, representing a 152% year-over-year increase.