Tastewise secures $17 million to serve AI-driven decision making to the food & beverage industry

Tastewise, the AI-powered platform that helps food brands bring products to market based on consumer data, announces today that it has raised $17 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Disruptive AI, who joins existing investors PeakBridge and PICO Venture Partners and brings Tastewise’s total funding to $21.5 million to date. Tastewise’s broad customer base spans food and beverage companies from Fortune 500s -- such as Nestle, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, and Campbell's -- to industry newcomers like JustEgg.

Following rapid growth and tripled revenues with its flagship insights and analytics AI platform, Tastewise will use this new funding to expand into new markets including Canada, Australia, Germany, France, and India. Tastewise is the leading provider of food delivery analytics that helps food brands connect with restaurants across multiple geographies.

These solutions are timely and urgent; the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a massive revolution in the ways people eat and drink. Today, 25% more people are interested in sustainable food, and 33% more people eat and drink for functional wellness, than in 2021. Today’s eaters and drinkers are more informed, more demanding, and above all, more digital. Based on the current rate of change in both consumer needs and food and beverage innovation, Tastewise data indicates that most of what we eat today will change significantly over the next decade. The old ways of measuring trends and behavior in the food industry, such as surveys and focus groups, are unable to capture the full picture of today’s changing market - nor the trends that define it.

Since its inception in 2017, Tastewise’s mission has been to provide the food industry with data-driven solutions for new product development, marketing, and foodservice sales. Tastewise enables the food industry to discover new flavors and product ideas, develop content for marketing campaigns, and find sales opportunities with restaurants and retail by fusing billions of data points across social media, recipes, and restaurant menus.

Using proprietary AI and the food and beverage industry’s largest available dataset, Tastewise accurately predicted the rise of several trends that have influenced eating and drinking during the COVID years, including:

• The rise of health as a driver for plant-based: Today, health is 2.4x more important than animal welfare for plant-based eating.
• The rise of functional health: 33% more consumers eat food and beverage for functional benefit since the beginning of 2021.
• The influence of digitalization on how, when, and what people eat: 19% of all US restaurants are on all 3 major delivery platforms, and 63% of all US restaurants changed their online menus in the last month.

"We're incredibly excited to partner with Tastewise because of the tremendous impact they have already demonstrated on the food and beverage industry and the potential we see for AI to become a key ingredient in the industry's resilience in the foreseen future,” said Izhar Shay, former Israeli Minister of Science & Technology and today a Venture Partner at Disruptive AI. “So much of what we eat and drink may change over the next decades, and Tastewise is positioned to help the world's most significant food and beverage brands build the future of this huge market. Our investment in Tastewise's mission will help create endless opportunities for the entire industry, from major brands to small newcomers, to change the market fundamentally through data-backed innovation."

“The way people choose what to eat and drink is transforming in the face of the global pandemic, climate change, new technologies, and increased interest in health and everything we eat in the near future will be fundamentally different. Tastewise is uniquely positioned to help the food and beverage industry forge this new reality,” says Alon Chen, Co-Founder and CEO of Tastewise. “Today’s consumers require food and beverage that responds to their needs and provides solutions to their problems - from the personal to the planetary. This latest round of investment in Tastewise will enable us to take our cutting-edge technology to more players in the market as we work together to create a healthier, tastier, and more sustainable industry.”

About Disruptive AI

Disruptive AI (DAI) is the first Israeli venture capital fund that specializes in Artificial Intelligence startups and acts as a home for the growing Israeli AI innovation ecosystem. DAI partners with leading Israeli entrepreneurs who combine their industry domain expertise with a strong AI technology vision aiming at building large, meaningful, and impactful global brands. Amongst its investors, the Fund is backed by more than 30 leading entrepreneurs who are active within the Israeli hi-tech arena and are involved with global companies which deploy AI as a cornerstone of their business strategy and products architecture.