Munich Startup: When we last spokeYou said that your solution is available in around 30 cafeterias, canteens, and cafeterias. What's the current status?
Delicious Data: A lot has happened at Delicious Data in the meantime. We are proud to be making further progress with our mission to reduce food waste. We have a product that creates significant added value for our customers in German-speaking countries and already have several references on the market. With our sales forecasts and food waste monitoring, we support large company canteens, caterers, and student unions. We have also launched a new product feature, the Intelligent Daily Planner, which has enabled us to tap into bakeries as a new market. In total, we have now won over approximately 1,000 locations to use our software solution to reduce food waste.
And above all, we have also achieved a great climate-relevant impact with our customers: Since our founding 5 years ago, we have now saved 820,000 meals, which corresponds to 1,000 tons of CO2 equivalents and 15 million hectoliters of economical water.
“The biggest challenge was the Corona lockdown”
Munich Startup: What obstacles did you encounter along the way?
Delicious Data: The biggest challenge so far has been the coronavirus lockdown. The period when a large proportion of our customers had to close. We used the crisis to further develop our product and also better manage our underground production, which is very relevant for bakery chains, gas station bistros, and cafeterias. This allows us to better avoid overproduction and sell-outs.
Munich Startup: How has your solution evolved?
Delicious Data: We are always in close contact with our customers and focus on their needs in order to make the product even more user-friendly and contribute to greater efficiency and sustainability in companies.
We initially launched the sales forecasting feature, which can help customers better plan total demand for the coming days and weeks and thus purchase more accurately. To become even more precise and further reduce unnecessary food waste, we can now also calculate demand for the current day more accurately over several hours and use this to calculate recommendations for the correct production quantity. This helps simplify everyday work, especially at branch locations that faced the challenge of planning uncertainty with production during the day.
Munich Startup: And how are things looking financially for you?
Delicious Data: In addition to sales with our customers, we now have new capital and additional partners with expertise for the upcoming growth phase. Both will help us grow the company faster.
Opportunities for us: we can grow the team faster to further develop the product and acquire more customers.
“If you optimize something, you have to measure the value concretely.”
Munich Startup: What learnings have you as a founding team learned so far?
Delicious Data: There are many lessons we've learned since our founding. One that was particularly important to us: When you optimize something, you also have to concretely measure its value. Initially, we only looked at optimizing planning and tried to use that to calculate food waste savings, which wasn't very accurate. The key was to weigh the waste directly and record it in our system, which created significant additional value for us and our partners.
Munich Startup: What role has the Munich ecosystem played in your journey so far?
Delicious Data: Munich has a very good startup ecosystem from which we have already benefited greatly:
- Right at the beginning, funding (Start?Grant from the Bavarian startup region)
- incubators Gate Garching and Plant1
- Many investors are present here
- Networks like Baystartup, which supports us with coaching and network access in the implementation of our financing rounds
- Accelerators EIT Food / Xpreneurs
- Many talents (there are some B2B SaaS companies, universities such as TUM, LMU)
Delicious Data: “Scaling is the next step”
Munich Startup: What milestones are you working towards next?
Delicious Data: For us, the next step is to scale by getting more customers excited about our mission even faster, even beyond our national borders.
The focus now is on: internationalization, growth of the team, optimization of the product, development of market segments LEH (Food retail, editor's note.) and bakeries.
Anyone who wants to meet Delicious Data can now register for the Register for the “Startup meets Crafts” event on October 19th.
