Zesty (YC W14) Raises $17M Series A to Improve the Health of Humanity | Hacker News Reader

Zesty (YC W14) Raises $17M Series A to Improve the Health of Humanity

blog.zesty.com

78 pointshol26 comments

According to the press release, they describe themselves as "San Francisco’s leading office catering service."

Unless they plan on dramatically expanding their product offerings, "Improve[ing] the Health of Humanity" sounds like disingenuous marketing-speak.

Don't get me wrong, catering is important and meals are a great way to bring employees together. Having used Zesty, the meals are from local restaurants and, though there are healthy options, there's lots of greasy options available.

Hi there, one of the founders from Zesty here. There is definitely some variety in the level of healthiness of our meals, and this is something we want to keep increasing over time, evangelizing healthy eating as we go. However, in order to have a significant impact, you need to operate on a large scale. We've learned from trying that you can't get most companies to adopt a service that is too extreme on the health side. It's too much of a behavior change for most people. Compared to what our clients were eating before, we are a significant step in the right direction, and we intend to keep taking bigger steps here over time. We're excited about the progress we've already made and look forward to how much more we can make with this funding.

So, you're basically telling me their marketing copy is as Zesty as their business name?

They are sending lunches to office buildings and making the world a better place[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXuFrtmOYKg

Considering Zero Cater used to continuously market themselves as a group that would "feed the world" [1] I'd say Zesty is quite demur in comparison.

Why are these catering companies branding themselves like charities?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8733320

We serve Zesty everyday at Flexport and I consider it to be one of our best investments.

1/ The team enjoys having high quality, healthy food served right here in our kitchen, they barely have to move to eat.

2/ People end up talking about work stuff during lunch most of the time

3/ When they are not talking about lunch, they're still hanging out with co-workers, which is good for our culture.

4/ Our team takes shorter lunch breaks than they did when they went out to eat, which means we are getting more hours of productivity from everybody.

5/ Hosting meals daily makes it easy to invite folks in for lunch, so it helps with doing external meetings as well--if you are interested in working at Flexport, come have lunch with us anytime :)

6/ It's pretty affordable, b/c we're getting economies of scale by everybody purchasing together, so for the extra hours of work and bonding, we get an insanely good deal.

I love Zesty and hope they can scale the business and make it very profitable because it is one of those companies whose value proposition for its customers is a no-brainer.

3/ * not talking about work...

Flexport sounds like a great place to work.

Question: how do you efficiently filter out job candidates who have lives of their own? My company is trying to make recruiting more efficient but we are always inundated with talented people who selfishly want to invest some of their time and energy away from the business.

Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

I can't tell if you're being extremely sarcastic or not.

I can't either.

I can.

> "We have quickly become the market leader in San Francisco."

This is an odd statement since I know there are at least two direct competitors who are far larger.

We are referring to being larger in the San Francisco market, not overall larger as a company.

Right — that's how I interpreted it. There are still two companies that are larger in San Francisco.

Why don't you just name which "far larger" competitors you're thinking of, so that he can address that?

Not OP, but I was wondering how they compare to ZeroCater, which is also YC-backed, feeds some big names like GitHub, Foursquare and Tumblr, and has all those billboards up and down 101.

Zesty also serves GitHub, and Zesty usually handles their events. There is a lot of business in town; more than enough to go around. And you don't need billboards to be a market leader.

How do you measure this? Number of meals delivered per week? I'm surprised ZeroCater and Cater2me are smaller...

David and Chris are extraordinary entrepreneurs. I learned a lot watching them build Zesty week over week during YC W14. This is a hard business to build. Providing consistent service in terms of restaurant relations, food quality, and delivery is non trivial. Zesty is the best at it. All of thedogeye's points about the value of serving high quality meals to your team are spot on. Congrats David, Chris and the Zesty crew!

Super impressed to see how far David and the team have come. I remember talking with him down the road from my flat three years ago about the inkling that Zesty was then. I remember when Chris first joined him and they showed me the first screenshots of the mobile app in a bar in London before they hotfooted it off to San Francisco and now they're raising $17,000,000. A pretty amazing ride. Congrats guys.

Especially in this climate, there are lots of startups fundraising all the time (indeed a few other startups announced their fundraising today), and I can imagine that from the outside it may often look easy to raise large sums of money. I can say without doubt first hand that this fundraise for Zesty is the result of just immense hardwork and relentless hustle from David and his team.

I have huge respect for 1) the aggressive growth and customer development; 2) the operational roll out (which, given each customer has Zesty workers onsite to set out the food, is a huge operational nightmare); 3) being humble enough to deviate and pivot the initial idea from a mobile app to a much more operations heavy b2b play

Nice good job.

David, if you don't mind answering, what made you decide to call it a day at groupspaces? Was there a certain event or circumstance that made you think "okay lets work on something else now".

This is extraordinary! The Zesty team has moved light years in months. Can't believe how much David and Chris have grown in their abilities. I raise a green drink to toast your success.

Way to go Zesty!

I applied to one of your engineering positions and never heard back.

Are they available?

Open to remote?

My apologies: send me an email at chris [at] zesty.com!

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