Gobble raises $10.75M to take the stress out of cooking
The company is aimed at giving working people, and families, the ability to have home cooked meals
When I was growing up, it was just me, my sister and my mother and we were always busy doing something. Whether it was me playing baseball, or my sister doing her dance recitals, it was tough to find the time to actually sit down and eat together. We did it, and my mother cooked as much as she could, but it was not easy,
That has become a problem for many families and Gobble, a provider of 10-minute gourmet dinner kit that is delivered right to the customer's door, wants to solve it. The company. announced on Thursday that it has closed a $10.75 million round of Series A funding.
The round was led by Trinity Ventures, along with Andreessen Horowitz, Fenox VC, Initialized Capital, Anjula Acharia-Bath and Rohan Oza, CEO of Ideas Merchants Capital. With this latest round, the company has now raised $12 million in total venture funding.
The Gobble service delivers freshly prepped ingredients for a meal that can be cooked with one pan in the short time span of 10 minutes. All ingredients are pre-portioned, pre-chopped, pre-mixed, and pre-cooked.
The typical Gobble customer is a busy professional, and it is geared especially toward busy parents, Ooshma Garg, founder and CEO of Gobble, told me. And the mission behind the company is to allow them to have healthy meals, without the time it takes to prepare, cook and clean, eliminating stress and letting them spend more time with their families.
The idea for the company came from Garg's childhood in Texas, where, every night, her father would cook healthy and colorful North Indian food for her family. When she moved away from home to go to Stanford, this tradition of home cooking suddenly stopped and she started eating unhealthy college food and takeout. The problem and her health came to a tipping point and she finally resolved that there had to be a better way to balance a busy 24/7 career and still eat healthy and homemade meals.
"Gobble alleviates stress for working parents by removing the pressure to cook from scratch every night and affording families the ability and energy to spend more quality time together. It allows a person to 'have it all.' A career and quality time with the family, and not to mention a delicious home-cooked meal," she said.
The company is now serving one million meals per year to families, or "dinner heroes," across California and Nevada, who save one hour every time they cook dinner with Gobble, as opposed to cooking from scratch with groceries or any other meal ingredient box delivery service.
"That one hour is priceless to busy parents and allows them to sit with their family and actually connect with their loved ones when they get home, instead of getting home to immediately check homework, run baths, cook dinner, do the dishes, put everyone into bed, and then do it all over again the next day," Garg told me.
While there are many food delivery companies out there, what separates Gobble is the way it uses data and analytics to find out what works best for its customers.
"Internally, our entire company and week to week menu design operates based on continuous data collection and analysis of our community's current taste preferences and ordering behavior. No other company in our space uses data as intensively to both determine what dinner kits to assign each unique family based on their tastes and produce those dinner kits in the most cost effective and time efficient manner at scale," said Garg.
The new funding will primarily be used for infrastructure and aggressive recruitment, as Gobble continues to grow.
"We have been hiring on average six employees per week. We will also use our funding to aggressively expand our engineering team towards enhancing our internal operations software and supporting algorithms to quantify the modern family’s diet preferences and resulting weekly sales expectations for each of our dinner kits," said Garg.
"Most recently, we have also begun building out software to optimize Gobble’s supply chain and ensure transparency and the freshest quality from partner farms to our industrial kitchens to our member's busy homes in order to deliver the best American dinner experience."
In addition to the funding it was also announced that Ajay Chopra, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, has joined the board of directors at Gobble.
“We at Trinity looked at quite a few food tech companies in our search for an investment that would be the right fit for our thesis on the space,” Chopra, said in a statement. “Gobble solves a massive pain point for working parents, helping them make a ‘hot off the stove’ family dinner in just 10 minutes. It helps that Gobble is also arguably the fastest growing company in the space. We are thrilled to be part of Ooshma’s dinner movement.”
Ultimately, the goal of Gooble, and Garg herself, is to allow busy working people and parents have the good, home cooked meal that is so elusive nowadays.
"Gobble is about making the modern family's life easier so they can have more quality time with their loved ones. Our current mission is to create love through food. That means different things to different people -- Some people enjoy cooking with their kids or loved ones, others enjoy and feel love when they are cooking a meal for someone they love, and lastly, when the meal only takes 10 minutes, you have more time to sit and enjoy real quality time without chores, technology, or stress," she said.
"We're the inventors of the prepped dinner kits. We deeply value creativity in house and always come out with things first. Today, we're disrupting the space with our 10-minute gourmet dinner kit, which lets families eat a freshly made 'hot off the stove' dinner in less time than it takes to get takeout delivery. Next, we'll be solving snacks, desserts, lunch, breakfast, and possibly even family activities and outings. Gobble is an innovator and new trusted staple of today's busy American home, if you want to see what’s next then keep watching Gobble."
