The Covid-19 pandemic has caused many to think about their shopping and eating habits as safety precautions have created an increase in online grocery shopping and shelter-in-place orders have more people cooking at home.
Because of this, a local startup has seen a sharp increase in its user base and is looking to help out residents during the current crisis.
Dallas-based Cooklist, a personal grocery platform that combines shopping, meal planning and inventory management, is launching a number of initiatives to help out during the pandemic. To ease the transition to online shopping, it's offering a $20 order discount to new users, offering free delivery from Target and adding additional pickup slots at certain stores for users. In addition, with the help of a $5,000 RevTech Ventures Impact Grant, Cooklist is providing free and discounted delivery to at-risk residents in the community.
“Ultimately, we want Cooklist to act as this personal shopper and personal chef and personal nutritionist all-in-one experience for people, and it can handle their end-to-end grocery cycle,” Brandon Warman, co-founder told NTX Inno. “It’s just something we can do to help reduce the amount that people are spending right now.”
Cooklist was co-founded in 2018 by Warman and Daniel Vitiello. Shortly after launching, the company joined Techstars’ accelerator program, adding the organization as an early investor. Since then, the company has gone on to raise about $500,000 in funding, with backers like RevTech, Matchstick Ventures and HarloKyn Advisors.
The pair have also founded local coffee-startup Handground.
And due to the surge in online shopping and on-demand delivery, the four-person team at Cooklist has tripled its user base since December, along with a six times increase in monthly traffic. And to capitalize on the growth, Warman said the startup is planning to open a new round soon.
"I guess what it really boils down to is we’re flipping the way that you grocery shop on its head."
“It’s an unfortunate situation, but there has obviously been a silver lining for us in that people are being forced to buy groceries and cook more food at home, and Cooklist is a perfect tool in helping with that process,” Warman said.
Cooklist was born out of an interest in personal data. Warman and Vitiello wanted to see if they could track all their purchase history from a local grocery chain. After making a request to the company and a little bit of negotiation, they were able to get mailed to them essentially a spread sheet of years of purchases, which made little sense to tech-focused founders.
They began building the platform, connecting the personal pantry to the grocery store. Cooklist’s app allows users to track their purchases and buy things based on personal goals and desired recipes (Cooklist has more than 2 million recipes from about 30,000 sources on its platform). They can then make purchases and plan pickups from more than 81 chains. In addition, Warman said one of the main things users turn to Cooklist for is help with weight loss, so the team built into the app ways to filter foods and recipes by diet type. Overall, Warman said the startup is looking to make grocery shopping more efficient and personalized, in addition to helping reduce food waste – a $200 billion issue in the U.S., Warman said.
“Our focus has been... just making it really easy to order groceries,” Warman said. “I guess what it really boils down to is we’re flipping the way that you grocery shop on its head from where it used to be, which is finding and choosing products, to now finding and choosing the meals or the experience that you want to have and just getting those products automatically picked and delivered for you.”
Overall, Warman said the pandemic has mostly had a positive impact on its business, adding that he thinks the pandemic may have accelerated people’s adoption of online shopping by nearly five years. He said that with the team already working remotely before the pandemic, the WFH shift was fairly easy. In addition, the company recently landed a deal with Target to beta test its product with its own on-demand delivery app Shipt.
As the company looks to grow in the future, Warman said Cooklist intends to partner with more grocery chains, as well as build out new features on the app, which is available on the Google and Apple stores.
“Now the risk of going into the grocery store is a lot higher than the risk of maybe someone picking a bad apple for you, so it’s kind of serving as a forcing function to get people to try online grocery for the first time,” Warman said. “Ultimately, we believe that buying your groceries online… is something that is lot more efficient for our daily lives. We think that even after all this is over, there will be some retention there. There will be more people than there were before this buying groceries online.”
