This was originally published on AlleyWatch
Food-X, the food-focused accelerator based in the city, recently announced its spring class for its fourteen-week program. A total of 10 companies were vetted and selected to receive $20K in investment, $30K convertible note at the end of the program, office space, and mentorship. This marks the four installment for the program. Today, I took a look at four of the startups that caught my attention.
Barley & Oats – This startup is a meal delivery service for mothers that caters towards pregnancy, postpartum, and the breast feeding stages. Currently serving NYC, the company prepares all the meals at the Hot Bread Kitchen incubator in Harlem. Subscribers to the service can expect fresh meals deliver to their door between 6-9pm daily. With pregnancy being a critical period where maternal diet, nutrition, and lifestyle matters most and with nearly 4 million pregnancies in 2013 in the US alone, this NYC startup is sitting at the intersection of a great market. However, the threat of a larger, well established competitor in the meal delivery space entering this market by adding this segment as a feature of its existing offering.
FreshSurety – This startup has developed a platform that has the ability to report real-time freshness, location, and temperature throughout the supply chain of produce and meat, down to the carton level. Freight loss and spoilage losses account for a $34 billion expense across the supply chain and FreshSurety’s certified freshness product can reduce this by as much as 50% when implemented.
Bite – This startup is a provider of smart menu platform through the use of iPads for restaurants. The company’s smart menu platform allows for the real time tracking of data, updates to the menu on the fly, instant feedback, and cross category recommendation engine powered by analytics all with the hopes of strengthening the customer experience and increasing the average spend per table. It’ll be interesting to see where Bite fares as more and more restaurants embrace digital but the experience has been mostly limited to POS as well as payments thus far. It’s also difficult to demand restaurants that are often cash strapped to outlay an expense for the purchase or lease of hardware.
Wine Sherpa – This startup is a mobile platform that connects wine drinkers to their local wine stores. The service offers 6 or 12 bottle recurring orders so that wine aficionados can explore and experience new ones in a frictionless process. There are already a number of wine focused social networks and services catering to this growing market where wine consumption per resident has been steadily increasing. Time will tell if Wine Sherpa is able to differentiate itself and establish a critical mass.
Source: http://www.alleywatch.com/2016/04/here-are-4-startups-from-food-x-accelerators-latest-class/
Apply to Food-X at http://food-x.com/apply/
