Big News: We’ve just secured $17M to serve AI-driven decision-making to the food & beverage industry

We’re excited to announce that we’ve just raised $17M in our Series A funding round! The round was led by our newest investment partner Disruptive AI, who joins our existing investors PeakBridge and PICO Venture Partners — and brings our total funding to $21.5M to date.

This new funding will allow us to further our mission of enabling food brands to bring tasty, healthy, and sustainable products to market, based on consumer data.

If you’re new here, a quick introduction:

Tastewise is the AI platform food brands use to make smarter decisions for a healthy, sustainable, and delicious future. We work with food brands, manufacturers, ingredient companies, and flavor houses (like Nestlé, PepsiCo, Givaudan, Campbell’s, Kraft Heinz, and more) to enhance new product development, build marketing strategies, and accelerate sales in retail and restaurants. Using proprietary AI technology, we capture food innovation instantly from 1M+ restaurant and delivery menus, 22B+ social interactions, and 5M+ home recipes. Long story short? We use consumer behavior, restaurant, and home cooking data to help the world’s biggest brands make better decisions.

Following rapid growth and tripled revenues with our flagship insights and analytics AI platform, we’re using this new funding to expand into new markets including Canada, Australia, Germany, France, and India, in addition to our existing UK and US coverage. These additional markets will include: consumer data from social media; country-specific recipe data from online recipes sources like Pinterest, blogs, etc; and foodservice data from restaurants (including delivery!). We already offer the largest dataset tracking food delivery analytics, and will continue to help food brands connect with restaurants across multiple geographies. This investment will allow us to expand our datasets in both our new product development solutions and our food service sales solution, as well as our forthcoming marketing solution.

Why are we focusing on global expansion for NPD, marketing, and sales in the food and beverage industry?

There are massive changes afoot in our world, with direct consequences on what we eat. Climate change, public and personal health, and geopolitical upheavals (hello, supply chain and inflation) are all significant drivers behind how people choose to eat and drink what they do. 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. With this rate of change in mind, we predict that most of what we eat today will change significantly over the next decade.

Given these changes in the market, the methods the food & beverage industry uses to make decisions must also change. 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. This is where we at Tastewise come in: providing AI-driven solutions to bridge the gap between food and beverage brands and their ever-changing consumers.

Using real-time insights and the food and beverage industry’s largest available dataset, we 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 eating: 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 digitalization 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 proud of the 50+ Tastewisers that wake up every day thinking about how to improve the food industry with data and AI. Our team brings heart and passion to the science of food analytics, and creating a team that cares deeply about our mission, the world around them, and each other is our greatest accomplishment.

We’re looking for talented, passionate people to join us: tastewise.io/careers

Since our inception in 2017, our mission has always been to provide the food industry with data-driven solutions for new product development, marketing, and foodservice sales. We help our customers 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. With the partnership of our investors, we look forward to expanding this work across the globe in the years ahead.