Is at that place a solution when you lot don’t want to cook but you’re ill of takeout?
Umi Kitchen wants to exist information technology. The app, launched by the daughter of Milkshake Shack and Union Square Cafe restaurateur Danny Meyer, allows domicile cooks to listing their meals on an app for delivery. Fittingly for a startup inbound both the sharing economy and the food delivery wars, the meals are delivered by Postmates.
Umi Kitchen has been bachelor through a pilot programme in Brooklyn since April, merely the iOS app launches in Manhattan on Tuesday.
Its investors include Danny Meyer, the founders of Sweetgreen, Elizabeth Cutler of Soul Cycle and Hayley Barna of Birchbox. The $1.iv-million seed round last year was led by David Tisch and Adam Rothenberg at Box Group.
Most startups that have tried to connect dwelling cooking with delivery do so through the Blue Apron model, in which ingredients are delivered to homes. Umi Kitchen is trying a different approach.
“Food is ane of the frontiers where nobody’south truly figured out how to ally and democratize peer-to-peer and the sharing economy and the emotional ideals of home cooking,” Umi Kitchen co-founder Khalil Tawil told
Mashable. “We’re providing a unique take that didn’t exist in the marketplace.”
Meyer is not the only popular NYC chef/restauranteur to explore the meal commitment market. David Chang, known for his Momofuku restaurants, has Ando, which is an on-demand delivery-but eating place, and Maple, which besides offers high-quality meal delivery.
Customers interested in Umi Kitchen can download the app and select a number of portions of a meal from a home cook, along with an hourlong dinner delivery time frame. The portions cost about $15 each — around the aforementioned equally a takeout eating place repast — and the cooks make foods like beefiness stew, meatloaf, roast salmon and pad thai. Customers can order upward to a week in advance and must order by 2 p.grand. for day-of delivery.
A chef on the Umi Kitchen app.
Credit: umi kitchen
The meals come with a list of ingredients and a personal annotation. Many chefs advertise meals planned for certain diets, similar gluten gratis or vegan food preferences or more specific diets like Whole30.
Don’t warm upwards your stove just notwithstanding. Cooks have to apply to go on the app. Right now, the startup has nigh 40 New York kitchens operating and 380 applications in. Considering Umi Kitchen outsources its delivery to Postmates, the chefs are simply required to melt — not package — the food before delivery. The visitor says its chefs are all food-safety trained and food-handler certified.
The delivery zone in Manhattan is from 116th Street to Houston Street and 5th Avenue to the Due east River.
Tawil and Hallie Meyer conceived of the company while graduate students at Yale University. Both missed home cooking and thought an app that delivered domicile-cooked meals would appeal to students and others who were homesick. The name “Umi” comes from the Standard arabic word for “my mother.”
For Meyer, 23, founding Umi Kitchen meant following in the family unit tradition.
“My whole life has been surrounded past these experiences of hospitality and domicile cooking,” Meyer said. “It was something I was always interested in, growing up in the restaurant business organisation in New York.”
Meyer and Tawil are focused on the New York launch correct now but see Umi Kitchen expanding to other cities in the future.
With the support of one of New York’s all-time about successful restaurateurs and and the names behind some of the buzziest companies in food and tech, the app certainly has a shot.
“Nosotros’re excited near this detail food sharing-economy model,” Meyer said. “This is something y’all desire to practise three or four times a week. It doesn’t have to be a special occasion.”