Re-Inventing Takeaways. Building The Marketplace for Home-cooked Food on Demand
The world is full of talented and passionate cooks — we all know at least one friend or family member who should probably have their own restaurant. The problem is not everyone has the time or the resources to pursue a career as a cook, and opening your own restaurant can be a huge financial gamble, leaving a lot of great cooks working elsewhere, and away from the kitchen.
Make money selling food from your own kitchen
Yummit is on a mission to change that, by making home-cooked food available on-demand. Essentially giving an army of food-lovers the tools to run their very own take-away from their home kitchen. While offering the cheapest way to run and manage a food business, with no start-up costs, and exposing them to an audience of foodies looking for something different.
Connecting hungry locals to talented home-cooks is something that we hope can change the landscape of fast-food for the better, giving customers more choice when it comes to eating out, or ordering takeaways. Healthier options with more niche tastes and better ingredients, all prepared by passionate home-cooks that are cooking for the pure joy of it. Offering up the same dishes they proudly serve their own friends & family on a regular basis, with recipes passed down through generations — perfected with time and care.
When you think of typical take-away food, the same few dishes tend to come to mind. Not a lot has changed over the years. We’d just like to offer a much more homely choice of food to sit alongside the classics, giving customers the option to enjoy amazing home-cooked food without having to make it themselves.
What food can I buy and sell on Yummit?
We simply label ourselves as ‘The homemade food marketplace’, meaning as long as it’s cooked at home we’re happy to to sell it. We have optimized the experience for on-demand food (or drink) — made-to-order, but there’s also the ability to plan ahead with future orders based on a cooks schedule, have non-perishable food posted nationwide, or even buy your own fresh, local, ingredients delivered by small-scale growers
This opens up the marketplace to everything from breakfast, lunch and dinners, to cakes, snacks, treats and drinks. We are purposely keeping it open-ended as we’re excited to see how creative people get with what they sell. I’m sure we will see food products for sale that we’ve not even imagined yet, so we’re keen to encourage that, and provide a place for it to flourish.
The Marketplace
We know for this idea to succeed we need to hold up our end of the bargain, which means providing an easy to use, blazing fast platform to make the process of buying and selling home-cooked food a joy. We’re happy with where the platform is at the moment in that respect, but this is just the beginning of our journey and our commitment is to maintain the best marketplace for you to buy & sell food online. Here’s how we are doing that:
FREE to use. Instant payments & payouts
Yummit is free to use for both cooks and customers. We simply take a 20% royalty split on any order made — to help keep the marketplace operational, while leaving a massive 80% of every sale with the cook, which they receive instantly thanks to Stripe Connect.
Full control to the cooks
We provide cooks with all the tools they need to sell their food on-demand, but the rest is up to them. We don’t dictate any aspect of their schedule, or their menu. Cooks will have full control over what they cook, when they cook, and what price they charge.
Collection or Delivery
Cooks might choose to deliver food, or meals may have to be collected from the cooks own address. Each item in the marketplace will be clearly marked as delivery, or collection (or both) — and you can filter results by either option. All food will be provided with suitable packaging to allow you to eat it at home, or on-the-go.
Thinking further down the road, we’d love to be able to integrate 3rd-party delivery services to help cooks focus more on the part they love, the actual cooking.
Open to all — anyone can sell
Anyone with a passion for cooking will have the chance to start selling their food on Yummit, whether you are a professional cook with a vast menu, looking to make some extra money at home, or an amateur home-cook with that one dish your family loves, all we care about is that you make authentic good food that people are going to love.
Trust & Security
As collection and delivery will be available, we want to make the experience as safe, quick and worry-free as possible. We achieve this by giving every customer and cook a ‘Trust Score.’ The more steps a user takes with us to verify their identity, the higher their Trust Score will be. This includes advanced steps such as ID verifications simpler things like connecting your Facebook account. Cooks and customers have the chance to decide who they deal with based on a user’s score. Once we’re up and running, user reviews will also come into play.
All cooks will have to comply with their local food laws and inspections, so having knowledge of food hygiene is a must. We require multiple photos of each meal — to give customers the opportunity to better decide what to eat. We’re inviting cooks to share kitchen photos as part of their profile, and tell their unique food story, to help customers make informed decisions.
Community
Some of the best cooking in the world is happening right now in homes across the globe. Authentic, local food, that doesn’t get to be enjoyed by a larger audience, we want to open that door to give cooks an outlet for their creativity in the kitchen, while providing a healthier, more diverse culinary experience for the local community, and travellers alike.
Invites, badges & rewards
Yummit’s goal is to operate worldwide, but we have to start small and roll out in the cities and towns that show the most interest. Once we’ve got the right numbers in a given community, we can flick the switch and allow orders to begin. The best way to bring Yummit to your town or city is to invite your friends — we have made this easy with a simple invite system, which will also allow you to earn rewards, such as discounts and free meals.
We believe it’s important to reward anyone who helps our community grow. To start, you can earn a 10% discount code for each new friend you invite, which you can stack up and save as many as you like. Invite a cook to Yummit, and you will earn money as they do too. More rewards are available.
Secure payments
Payments will be handled up-front and online via Stripe, meaning customers only receive their food once they’ve paid for it, giving cooks peace of mind when it comes to the money side of things, while giving customers a trusted & convenient way to pay.
Our Story
Yummit is built by two childhood friends based in Coventry, England. Liam McKay, Designer and Ryan Southgate, Developer. We have been building the marketplace (mostly at evenings & in spare time) for around two years now, but we recently made this our full time pursuit, leaving two great jobs behind to build something we truly believe needed to be made.
I was working for a San Francisco based startup called Creative Market, which is a marketplace for digital design assets, where I learned a lot about what it takes to build and manage a successful marketplace. Ryan’s background is in building financial software for large banks — helping investors, bank staff and customers manage their money, investments & pensions.
The Beginning
The idea for Yummit sparked when we both took a trip to New York back in 2014 and we were positively jealous of the choice available when it came to eating out or ordering food in. Compared to what’s available in the UK, the US has a whole new level of flavour and taste available. We wanted to deliver a similar level of choice everywhere in the world, whilst taking it a step further by focusing on healthier home-cooked options.
A truly global marketplace already
Since our trip, the two of us have been working on Yummit both home & away! I myself have been travelling around Europe in my car, living in Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Croatia and many others — while Ryan has even managed to work on his code as far away as Australia & America.
Taking time to experience and appreciate food in different cultures and environments has definitely given us more of a passion to make this marketplace a reality. Our hope is that Yummit will one day help travellers all across the globe experience a much more unique & genuine local taste as they travel too.
It’s been a ton of hard work getting to this point, and we’re very proud of what we have built, but we know that the real hard work is still ahead of us. But right now, we are going to take this moment to enjoy this important milestone, and invite you all to share in our vision of building a new kind of take-away experience with Yummit.
Thanks for taking the time to hear our story, we’d be happy to hear your input. We are definitely open to ideas, and are actively seeking feedback and questions, so please ask us anything. We welcome your thoughts. Here’s looking forward to an exciting 2018!
— Liam McKay,
Yummit Co-founder & Designer
If you are interested in selling food from your kitchen, sign up today and register your interest as a cook. For everyone else, now is a great time to use your unique invite codes to sign up friends & family while earning rewards & free meals.
A huge thank you in particular to Brian Reavis of Natural Atlas, and Spencer Finnell for their stellar work and support on the front-end development side of things.
Ask any questions you have below, or head over to Product Hunt. For anything else, you can Contact us directly. — Liam & Ryan
