Foodtree Media Inc.

For specialty food and beverage brands, Foodtree is a social-mobile marketing platform. It is like Bandpage meets About.me for food.

Anthony Nicalo – CEO, 10+ years professional food experience; 3rd business founded; Michelin-starred Chef; Information science expert- nationally ranked U. Michigan Debate

Derek Shanahan - Product and Community; 10+ years interaction design and community leadership; Founder, 20 Something-Bloggers Network- 15 million monthly page views; Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford, while captaining soccer team to two Final Fours

Tom Carchrae - PhD, CTO; 20+ years programming experience
Optimization guru at Matrikon and Actenum; Expertise includes scheduling, artificial intelligence, machine learning and constraint programming

ADVISORS: Lane Becker (Adaptive Path, Get Satisfaction); Matt Galligan (SocialThing, SimpleGeo, Circa); Joel Solomon (Renewal Partners, Stonyfield Yogurt)

Today, our target customers are specialty food businesses, like manufacturers, grocers, distributors, wineries, coffee roasters, etc. They need social marketing tools that make it easy for them to share the story behind their product, integrate with social media channels, and work for mobile consumers. In the future, our customers will include Consumer Packaged Goods companies that collectively launch 25,000 plus food products per year. They need better information about ingredient-level trends and consumer values-based preferences.

Our target market is gourmet and specialty food. It is $75 Billion per year in the US. The annual marketing and advertising budget in the industry is $7.5 Billion. This market is driven by 57 million households in the US who are specialty food shoppers.

Market research in the US is $15 Billion per year. $7 Billion of that is market intelligence for the food and beverage industry. It is driven by CPG companies like Unilever and Kraft, who launch over 25,000 new food and drink products per year.
We sell to executives at medium to large food brands, including manufacturers, certification organizations and branded distributors. They buy to make it easier for their potential customers to locate their products, especially on smartphones; or to position their products as premium by sharing the story behind their ingredients.

Facebook pages- Foodtree integrates and lets them reach a food-aware audience directly.

DIY- businesses building their own custom web/mobile solutions. The Foodtree platform gets them their faster/cheaper.

Mintel/Euromonitor- more accurate, real-time data.