Apr 19, 2020

With dining in now ‘de rigeur’, food delivery startups are seizing the opportunity and investors are too. Witness a £33m Series G raise for London-based recipe box delivery startup, Gousto, led by Perwyn, with participation also from other existing backers BGF Ventures, MMC Ventures and Joe Wicks (yes, that Joe Wicks). This follows a Series F raise in July 2019 and Series E in January that year (see Backers add more gusto to Gousto’s recipes ), and brings the total raised so far to some £130m (Source: CrunchBase). Gousto’s pricing hasn’t changed since then – starter boxes (2 meals, 2 people) still cost £25 and family boxes £47.75 for 4 meals for couples with 2.5 kids. According to TechCrunch, the average price per meal is also still £2.98 (really? still?) with a claimed four million meals shipped to 380k households each month. Just whipping out my abacus. I calculate implied revenues of some £12m p.m. In January 2019 they claimed to have been shipping 1.5 million meals a month. Gousto’s filed accounts show losses of £15.6m on revenues of £49.3m in 2018. By way of comparison, Gousto’s main archrival, Berlin-based HelloFresh, ended 2019 with revenues of €1.8bn on which it lost a net €10.1m, significantly less than the €82.1m loss in 2018. HelloFresh generated over €1bn from the US market but does not give a country breakout for the rest of its business. HelloFresh charges from £5.00 per meal, reducing to £3.40 for 5 recipes a week for 4 people. May the best box win!