London-based City Pantry picks up £1.1M to grow office catering marketplace

London-based city Pantry, which operates an administrative center catering platform to aid you order in food for body of workers and firm meetings, has raised £1.1 million in new funding. The funding comes from Angel Co Fund, and The London Co investment fund (each of which can be part-funded by using tax-payer cash), and quite a lot of angels and current investors.

A graduate of retail startup incubator TrueStart, metropolis Pantry says it’s going to use the injection of cash to consolidate its robust place in London and to extend to other cities, both within the U.ok. and in different places in Europe. It additionally plans to invest in spend money on gross sales, marketing and engineering.

In a call, the startup’s founder and CEO Stuart Sunderland told me that competitors to city Pantry embrace traditional corporate caterers, sandwich outlets, pizza supply locations, and to a lesser extent, the more moderen breed of restaurant delivery corporations comparable to Deliveroo and Uber’s UberEATs.

relating to direct competitors running a identical administrative center catering platform/marketplace, there’s additionally Rocket web’s CaterWings. on the other hand, Sunderland says he’s barely seen any affect on city Pantry on the grounds that CaterWings opened doors in London. And along with, he says, the corporate or events-primarily based catering market is huge. specifically, he cites estimates that the european catering market is price £forty eight billion by myself.

To that finish, metropolis Pantry at present offers two merchandise: a simple per adventure ordering gadget for one-off catering, and a “meal plan” subscription service for place of work managers who have to organise regular team of workers conferences and company situations where food is to be equipped.

The meals itself is prepared with the aid of the catering corporations — together with independent chefs, restaurants, and side road-meals carriers — that metropolis Pantry partners with, while the startup itself organises delivery. Sunderland says that the average team dimension city Pantry is requested to cater for is 34 people.

And must Deliveroo et. al. begin to eat more of the corporate catering lunch, metropolis Pantry may all the time increase into different team catering markets, equivalent to events or different leisure and social situations. similar to place of job meals, its order-ahead-of-time, relatively than on-demand supply, is smartly applicable.