FoodSpace: Saving Time, Money, and Food (And Our Planet)
When Ayo Oshinaike was a college student, he found himself roaming the aisles of grocery stores unsure of what items to buy or what to cook. He ended up overbuying food and cooking the same recipes over and over again, leading to wasted money, spoiled food, and some very bored taste buds.
To combat this problem, Oshinaike teamed up with Dan Yags and Zach Van to create Food Space, a web app to streamline the food planning and purchasing process. Foodspace gives you one place to save all or your favorite recipes and discover new ones, assemble multiple recipes into organized lists, and get your whole list delivered if you don’t want to take it to the store.
Currently Foodspace can facilitate grocery delivery via Instacart to most zip codes across the USA. Peapod, Walmart, and Amazon/Whole Foods delivery will be available soon.
FoodSpace has big plans for the future. Their overall mission is to make it easy to improve your nutrition while reducing food waste. In the next few months they will be rolling out smart inventory management to remind you to use up what you have with relevant recipe recommendations as well as a nutrition calculator to let you know how your recipes and grocery lists stack up to your nutritional goals. Other features in the pipeline are a savings/coupons explorer, syncing to pinned recipes on Pinterest, and a meal planning calendar.
Currently, FoodSpace has partnerships with Instacart, a grocery delivery service company, and Stop and Shop, a northeast grocery store chain. Stop and Shop helps supply the app with ingredient pricing information and grocery store deliveries. Their next goal is to partner with Whole Foods and Amazonfresh in hopes to meet the needs of different customer segments by offering a range of low and high-end grocery stores. They are focusing on partners that have a national coverage of delivery so that shoppers anywhere can get the ingredients and savings they need.
FoodSpace joined IDEA in 2017, and is currently in the GO Stage. In July 2018, they raised about $100,000 from their personal network to develop the app, create partnerships, and start to market FoodSpace. Also in 2018, they partnered with Food Banks located in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York, to help distribute food items to families during the government shutdown. Now in 2019, FoodSpace is beta testing their Minimum Viable Product and actively developing the platform for a wide national release.
For ventures, currently going through the IDEA program, Oshinaike urges them to take the process seriously and to think hard about whether or not the business will be functional and successful. “It is important not to force an idea or a company. You need to make sure that your customers are really experiencing the problem your company solves and that is what IDEA helps you understand”.
If you are interested in starting your own venture, please visit this page and sign up for the next New Venture Information Session.
