{"id":46304,"date":"2023-10-20T15:49:30","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/food-tech-startup-kitchit-shuts-down\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:49:30","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:49:30","slug":"food-tech-startup-kitchit-shuts-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/food-tech-startup-kitchit-shuts-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Food-tech startup Kitchit shuts down"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"td-post-featured-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"640\" height=\"332\" itemprop=\"image\" class=\"entry-thumb\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Kitchit-640x332.jpg\" alt=\"Kitchit\" title=\"Kitchit\"><\/div>\n<p>An on-demand private chef startup that had secured more than $10 million in funding has shut down and issued&nbsp;a dire warning for other tech companies operating in the food space.<\/p>\n<p>Silicon Valley-based Kitchit offered a platform where chefs could visit users&#8217; homes and cook for them,&nbsp;and has served 100,000 meals since its launch in 2011.<\/p>\n<p>The startup raised over $US8 million in total, including a funding round it closed in December 2014.<\/p>\n<p>But due to an increasingly cut-throat market and a lack of investor interest, Kitchit has shut down, another in a long line of similar startups calling it quits.<\/p>\n<p>In a lengthy and insightful&nbsp;blog post, founders Brendan Marshall and Ian Ferguson detail the startup\u2019s journey from \u201cfirst bite\u201d to the \u201cbittersweet finale\u201d and the reasons behind its demise.<\/p>\n<p>It begins with the team\u2019s plans to create \u201cthe world\u2019s largest \u2013 and its first decentralised \u2013 restaurant\u201d and their early success with these plans, with 30-40% gross profit margins.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAn accomplishment that was unrivalled by many food companies at scale, to say nothing of food-tech startups,\u201d the founders say.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe believed that these were the early indicators of the venture-scale business we\u2019d been searching for.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But it all started&nbsp;to come apart, with the founders saying the company\u2019s funding runway ended just as the industry faced some troubling times.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve navigated five years and made the most of every dollar raised,\u201d they say.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNevertheless, investment runways are finite, and unfortunately ours reached its end at a moment of substantial upheaval in the food-tech world.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhile Kitchit\u2019s business fundamentals have always been strong, our scale has been too limited to outshine the tumult around us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It comes as several other startups playing in the food space have been forced to shutter operations, including SpoonRocket in March due to a lack of funds, Competitor Dinner Lab earlier this month and Kitchit rival KitchenSurfing.<\/p>\n<p>The founders\u2019 blog post concluded with an ominous warning for other startups operating in the space.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo we close our doors with a mix of sadness for our customers, chefs and employees on one hand, and on the other a recognition that our market is simply not ready to sustain a venture-scale business,\u201d the founders say.<\/p>\n<p><em>Follow StartupSmart on<\/em> <em>Facebook,<\/em>&nbsp;<em>Twitter,<\/em><em>LinkedIn&nbsp;<\/em><em>and&nbsp;<\/em><em>SoundCloud.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An on-demand private chef startup that had secured more than $10 million in funding has shut down and issued&nbsp;a dire<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":63047,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46304"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}