By Avigayil Kadesh
When Chen Lev-Ami quit her tech job in online gaming one day in 2011 to start her own business, she didn’t realize she would start a modest revolution in the way Israelis in the central region order food over the Internet.
Yummi, the site she launched as an online platform where ordinary people could connect with home chefs, soon had a bunch of competitors.
But that’s all right with Lev-Ami, 33. “Competition is a sign that the idea is a good one,” she says, and points out that each similar site actually offers something a little different.
Aroundish, for example, targets the working lunchtime crowd whereas Yummi is intended for family dinner hour.
These and other services work on the same proven assumptions: First, that there are many talented home chefs, some with professional experience and others with life experience, who could be earning extra cash if they just knew how to find hungry customers. Second, that many people who are too busy to cook, or pack a lunch, welcome a home-cooked meal once a week or even more often.
Merav Zaks-Bet Levi, cofounder of Aroundish, says she and her cofounders discovered in their initial market research that filling the lunch niche would lead to loyal customers.
“As career women, we don’t have much time to cook, but we were constantly smelling the food our neighbors were cooking and wanted to find out what they were making and somehow order it for our families,” says Zaks-Bet Levi. “Most of the career moms we asked said if we offered our service for lunch, they would order every day.”
She says that Aroundish, started in 2014, has an 80 percent customer retention rate.
“We constantly ask our clients why they want to order from us instead of takeout, and the first answer is always that every day is a different menu, so they’re never bored,” she relates. Customers also perceive home-cooked food as more healthful.
North American launch
Yummi began with Lev-Ami’s craving for homemade meatballs one night. She had an epiphany that surely someone right in her neighborhood was making that very dish and might be happy to sell her a portion or two, but she had no way to find out.
So she determined right then and there to build Yummi. “I was so excited about the idea that I couldn’t eat for four days,” Lev-Ami says. “I decided that’s my destiny in life.”
She launched her startup with “10 really good chefs” in the Sharon region. Now Yummi has about 50 chefs and 5,000 customers, and is spreading to cities outside the center of the country.
Yummi chef Carmit Harari. Photo by Hadas PeretzAnd that’s just the beginning. Lev-Ami is translating Yummi’s website to English and raising investments for a North American launch in 2015. “I think we’ll start in Toronto,” she says. “It’s a big city with a lot of families and a suburban feel.”
Zaks-Bet Levi, a 36-year-old lawyer by training, is also setting her sights beyond Israel. “We are raising money now to duplicate the model and offer it in the US,” she says. “Our system has already been built to support other languages.”
She is well aware that online platforms for personal chefs, such as
Kitchit and
Munchery in California, got into the field well ahead of her. In fact, she cites a TechCrunch report on the rapid growth of tech-related food enterprises in the United States. But she firmly believes that Aroundish can offer a unique approach, focus and competitive edge.
The name Aroundish, she explains, conveys that “it is a location-based service -- you can choose the dishes around you. In South Tel Aviv you’ll see different dishes than in North Tel Aviv, for example. At the moment we’re up to five hubs, each serving a radius of 500 meters, and we hope to expand to other areas of Israel.”
How does it work?
Yummi and Aroundish each feature some professional chefs who now want to cook from home for various reasons, such as the desire to spend more time with their kids.
Every Yummi chef has a menu that appears on the website. You pick the food you want and order online, at least one day in advance. The food is made to your special preferences, such as without sugar, no garlic, etc., and delivered to your home.
Aroundish’s service is similar, but you can order lunch each day until 11:00 am. There is a wide variety of food on offer, but limited amounts of each dish. If you order late, you might not get your first choice.
Not all of the cooks have professional training, and the range of chefs makes it easy for people, especially families, to put together a dinner that fits everyone’s preferences. Vegetarian, vegan, kosher, low-fat, gluten-free – everything is available on one site.
And though customers tend to try different chefs each time they order, Lev-Ami was surprised to find that most of them crave basic comfort foods. Chicken schnitzel, an Israeli favorite, is the most often purchased item on the site.
“We encourage our chefs to cook what they cook for their family,” says Lev-Ami. “We see that Yummi is really replacing mom’s cooking or what people would have cooked for themselves.”
For now, all of Israel’s personal-chef platforms are in Hebrew only. But that’s likely to change soon. Watch for these companies to make their delicious debut abroad.