Chef-Led Startup meez Raises $11.5M to Place Recipes at The Heart of Hospitality

meez offers core elements of its recipe management tool for free to further its mission to become the universal recipe medium for culinary and beverage professionals  

NEW YORK, Nov. 3, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, meez, the first-of-its-kind digital professional recipe tool, has closed an $11.5M Series A funding round led by Craft Ventures with participation from Struck Capital, FJ Labs, AME Cloud Ventures, Moving Capital, Max Mullen, Lenny Rachitsky, Mike Montero, Bobby Lo, Austin Rief, Louis Beryl, James Beshara, and Allison Pickens and the Todd & Rahul Fund. This latest investment follows a $6.5M Seed round in January 2022, bringing the company's total funding to $18M.

Founded in 2020 by professional chef Josh Sharkey, meez is a powerful recipe tool that transforms how food and beverage professionals manage and execute recipes. It digitizes every aspect of the recipe workflow, allowing culinary professionals to organize, train, cost, create, and analyze their recipes. Today, meez also launched a free version that offers access to many of its core features such as recipe creation and organization, dynamic scaling, and sharing. The free offering allows industry professionals to use meez as the home for their recipes throughout their entire career and fuels collaboration by enabling them to share creations with peers.

"When I was a chef, a great recipe management tool didn't exist for restaurant professionals. They skewed towards ERP or inventory systems with little understanding of how chefs think, create, and use recipes day to day," explained Josh Sharkey, CEO of meez. "We are focused on serving chefs and mixologists first. Our recipe workflow tool is dedicated entirely to the recipe process, from ideation through execution. My team is excited to use this investment to help even more restaurants and bars have control over their culinary IP by connecting the creation and management of recipes with the multiple business functions they affect."

Built to help culinary professionals execute smarter and faster, meez turns existing recipe content into an interactive database of "living" recipes. Unlike a recipe stored in a spreadsheet or notebook, meez recipes can be shared and taught to colleagues, scaled and converted to any unit of measure, and used to make better business decisions like how to price menus.

Already deployed in more than 1,200 kitchens worldwide spanning fine dining and fast casual restaurants, culinary schools, ghost kitchens, and catering companies, meez has tens of thousands of active users. The recipe management tool has proven to significantly increase profit margins for kitchens of all sizes by several thousands of dollars per month and per location. After implementing meez, chefs and operators can launch new menu items and even entirely new virtual concepts in up to 75% less time. 

The new investment will be used to build out the company's product and engineering teams, drive awareness around the new free offering, and launch new premium features that allow chefs to instantly assess how their recipes contribute to the profitability and success of the business. These features will empower executive chefs to fine-tune their menu items in response to sales, demand, and margin data.

"Most industries have built business intelligence tools around their core offering, yet food and beverage companies have never put recipes centerstage – until meez. Focusing on the most critical piece of a restaurant's success, meez has built a product that is both easy to use and improves the bottom line. Josh and the team have had impressive organic adoption right out of the gates, and we're excited to see this take off," said Michael Tam, partner at Craft Ventures.

For additional information, visit getmeez.com and follow along on social media @getmeez.

Launched in 2020 by entrepreneur, chef, and restaurant industry veteran Josh Sharkey, meez is a first-of-its-kind digital recipe tool created for food and beverage professionals. The epitome of user-friendly, meez offers collaborative and shareable recipe databases, laser-accurate ingredient costing, automated scaling and conversions, customized training, specialized allergen identification, and much more. Currently, in use across over a thousand kitchens worldwide, meez has quickly taken the culinary world by storm as the must-have recipe solution. To learn more, visit getmeez.com.

SOURCE Meez Culinary Solutions