SOUTH AFRICA – South African meal kit delivery startup UCOOK has been fully acquired by Silvertree Holdings in a deal worth ZAR187 million (US$12.3 million).

Founded six years ago and now a market leader, UCOOK is a dinner kit delivery service providing sustainable and ethically sourced ingredients straight to a user’s doorstep.

Having previously received investment from Silvertree Holdings, the startup has now been acquired outright in a deal that sees co-founders David Torr, Christopher Verster-Cohen and Katherine Barry exit the business and hand the executive reins to Silvertree’s Peter Allerstorfer and his team, reports Disrupt.

“Peter is a great executive with a keen eye for detail, I look forward to watching from the sidelines as UCOOK explores new avenues.

“We’re immensely proud of what we built, but I felt it was time to exit the business to allow me to focus on other ventures,” said Torr.

The deal follows Ucook’s acquisition of Granadilla Eats mid last year, in collaboration with its sister entity Faithful to Nature (FTN).

Granadilla Eats is an online food and fresh produce delivery service launched at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, and was born out of the need for a reliable home-delivery service for groceries.

Egyptian restaurant-tech startup OneOrder raises US$1m funding

Cruising to North Africa, OneOrder, a new logistics company solving Egyptian restaurants’ supply chain inefficiencies, has announced the launch and the successful completion of a US$1 million fundraise.

Founded by leading Egyptian restaurateur Tamer Amer – the founder of Fuego Sushi and Longhorn Texas BBQ, two of Egypt’s most successful restaurant chains – OneOrder aims to tackle Egypt’s restaurant industry’s main supply chain issues – pricing, quality and timing.

The startup’s platform allows Egyptian restaurants to buy all their needs from one application. There are similar restaurant supply chain inefficiencies in other countries in MENA and OneOrder aspires to, over time, expand its proposition geographically across the region.

The US$1 million fundraise was led by A15, a leading MENA venture capital firm.

“We believe restaurants should be focussed on delivering a high-quality experience and service to their customers without having to worry about sourcing and procurement.

“We are the platform to deliver that. I’m very excited about the future as our market opportunity is huge. Egypt and the wider region are booming economically, and the food and beverage sector is only growing larger,” Amer said.

OneOrder has a large market opportunity as there are around 45,000 licensed restaurants in Egypt, but there are as many as a quarter of a million unregistered restaurants that are all operating and in need of supplies.

The whole Food & Beverage Hospitality market in the country was estimated to be US$13 billion by the US Department of Agriculture in 2019, and OneOrder expects that amount to have expanded significantly since then.

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