A new startup from the founders of grocery delivery pioneer Peapod wants to arm you with more information about what's in your food.
Sifter, founded by brothers Andrew and Thomas Parkinson, is a grocery shopping platform that lets you search for products based on your diet and medical needs. Users can set up a profile on Sifter that identifies any specific allergies, dietary restrictions, medical history and other factors, and they can search Sifter's platform for food items that are safe to consume and fit their lifestyle. Users can also drop in a link from any recipe online, and Sifter will tell you if the ingredients are safe, and where to buy the products online.
Once users are ready to check out, Sifter connects them to one of its grocery partners, which so far includes Walmart, Amazon, Target, Walgreens, Stop & Shop, Giant and Kroger-owned stores.
The goal is to save people from spending countless hours scouring ingredient labels for foods that don't fit their diet or medical needs, and to create a better way for people to find the safe food products they need, whether it's for a gluten-free diet or to avoid harmful allergens.
"If a kid has an allergy to peanuts, we’re able to sort through hundreds of thousands of labels and come back and tell them these products are good for you," Andrew Parkinson told me. "In their case, it's life or death."
Sifter announced Tuesday that it has raised $4.6 million in seed funding from Valor Equity Partners and Hyde Park Angels. Valor, a Chicago VC firm that's also backed Tesla and SpaceX, invested through its Valor Siren Ventures Fund, a $400 million food-focused fund that counts Starbucks among its backers.
Sifter is free for shoppers. It collects a fee when you buy a product through one of its affiliate partners like Walmart or Amazon, and it charges food brands to advertise on its platform. This helps smaller food brands gain more visibility, and helps shoppers find health-conscious food brands they might otherwise not have seen, Parkinson said.
The Parkinson brothers founded grocery delivery service Peapod in 1989 and took the company public in 1997, before it sold to Ahold in 2001. They also founded ItemMaster, a spinoff from Peapod that created a grocery item database, which sold in 2019 to Gladson.
Sifter pulls its data from ItemMaster and a half dozen other data providers, Parkinson said.
Eventually, Sifter plans to integrate directly into a grocery's e-commerce platform, allowing shoppers to search for foods that match their needs directly where they shop, as well as the ability to scan items in store from their phone.
