Munich Startup: Last time we talked, you said your solution is used by roughly thirty dining halls, staff restaurants and cafeterias. What’s the current status?
Delicious Data: A lot has happened at Delicious Data since then. We’re proud that we’re still making progress on our mission to reduce food waste. We have a product that creates considerable added value for our customers in the German-speaking region and also have some customer references in the market. With our sales forecasts and food waste monitoring, we support large company staff restaurants, caterers and student services. And with our intelligent daily planner, we’ve launched a new product feature that will allow us to tap into bakeries as a new market. We’ve been able to get approximately 1000 institutions on board that are now using our software solution to reduce food waste.
Above all, we’ve had an impressive impact on climate efforts with our customers: Since our founding five years ago, we’ve been able to save 820,000 meals, which is equal to 1000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents and 15 million hectoliters of economic water.
“The biggest challenge was the corona lockdown”
Munich Startup: What obstacles have you encountered along the way?
Delicious Data: The biggest challenge so far has been the corona lockdown. The phase when the majority of our clients had to close. We used the crisis to develop our product further and to improve the management of daily production operations, which is highly relevant to bakery chains, gas station cafés and cafeterias. This will make it even easier to avoid overproduction and markdowns.
Munich Startup: How has your solution evolved?
Delicious Data: We’re always in close contact with our customers and focus on their needs in order to make the product even more user-friendly and to contribute to greater efficiency and sustainability in companies.
We first started with the sales forecasts feature. This is where we can help improve advanced planning for the overall demand for the days and weeks ahead, which leads to more accurate buying. In order to become even more precise and to reduce unnecessary food waste even further, we can now also calculate the demand for the current day for hours ahead and compute recommendations for the right production volumes. We can help simplify the daily work routine, especially at branch locations, that face the challenge of production planning uncertainties throughout the day.
Munich Startup: And how are things looking financially?
Delicious Data: In addition to revenue with our customers, we now have new capital and additional partners on board with know-how for the next growth stage. Both will help our company grow faster.
The opportunities for us are that we can expand the team faster to keep developing the product and acquire more customers.
“If you optimize something, you also have to measure the amount in concrete terms”
Munich Startup: What lessons have you learned so far in the founding team?
Delicious Data: We’ve learned a myriad of lessons since founding the company. One was particularly important to us: If you optimize something, you also have to measure the amount in concrete terms. In the beginning, we only looked at optimizing planning and tried to draw conclusions about savings in food waste, which was not very accurate. The crucial difference was weighing the waste directly and recording it in our system, which generated significant additional value for us and our partners.
Munich Startup: What role has the Munich ecosystem played on your path so far?
Delicious Data: Munich has a very good startup ecosystem that we have already greatly benefited from:
- Funding right at the beginning (Start?Zuschuss from Gründerland Bayern)
- Startup centers Gate Garching and Werk1
- There are many investors here.
- Networks like Baystartup, which has helped us implement funding rounds with coaching and network access
- Accelerators EIT Food / Xpreneurs
- Many talented individuals (there are some B2B SaaS companies, universities, like TUM, LMU)
Delicious Data: “Scaling is the next step”
Munich Startup: What milestones are you working towards next?
Delicious Data: For us, scaling is the next step. We want to get additional customers on board with our mission even faster, and do so in other countries as well.
The focus now is on internationalization, expanding the team, optimizing the product and on tapping into the market segments of food retail and bakeries.
If you would like to meet Delicious Data, you can register free of charge for the event “Startup trifft Handwerk” on 19 October.