The birth of Cook Eat (Part 1/3)
It all started with a lunch meeting almost 4 years ago with Ela Haney. Fast forward to today and after thousands of hours of work, we’re going online with an idea that will hopefully allow the sharing economy to finally break into the food sector. What does it feel like to finally show everyone what we’ve built? Quite daunting, actually.
Today we are 🚀 launching Cook Eat, an online marketplace for home-cooked food. Today also marks the start of the 3-month pilot phase of our platform!
Driven by the belief that healthy, fresh food should always be the most convenient option, we are making that a reality by connecting private cooks, through an online marketplace, with people who want to eat. During the conceptual phases of our project, we saw different approaches on how the distribution of the food was handled in our competitors’ marketplaces. In our first tests, we actually only started with dining at the cooks’ tables. Over time it became clear that as our objective is about the food — rather than the tourism- or social-based aspects — it was important for us to offer all service options for cooks to choose from. Whether it’s dining with other guests at the cooks’ table 🏠, packing it up for guests to take with them 🍱 or handing it over to our delivery partner Veloblitz 🚲— we’re certain that there will be an option for everyone!
There are a lot of emotions involved with building something and then opening it for the world to see. Many hours of work went into the execution of an idea that, ultimately, isn’t 100% certain to work. What if no one wants to use it? What if we only get 71 signups in the next 3 months? These kinds of questions have been occupying our minds daily for several years — but at the same time, these sort of questions are also precisely the ones you want answered; in the end, this is also one of the reasons we built Cook Eat! As we don’t know what the future holds, we remain just as excited as you (hopefully) to see what happens.
With this 3-part article I would like to go over the journey that brought Cook Eat to where it is today in the hope that others can benefit in some way. With all the things we have learned from the community, we’d like to give back too. In addition, I will be posting regular updates from our pilot to keep you in the loop. Hopefully I can also welcome you at my table in the near future :)
En guete!
You can find part 2 here
