In 2019, Matthew Bouchner and Will Said, two college friends from the Atlanta area, burst through the doors with MealMe, a food-delivery price comparison aggregator. But aggregators quickly became ubiquitous. So MealMe pivoted. More than once.
It started by adding a function to allow consumers to order food directly through the app. Then it swiveled again, to a B2B model, offering its API to other businesses to integrate ordering and inventory technology.
Today, MealMe provides inventory data from more than 1.2 million restaurants, grocery stores, and retailers.
Matthew Bouchner and Will Said of MealMe
“We needed menus and ordering for the original concept,” said Bouchner, MealMe’s co-founder and president, in an interview. “We built the tech for ourselves but then realized other companies needed it.”
Outside investors seem sold on the new focus. MealMe recently announced it had raised $8 million in Series A funding, which it will use to increase store selection and grow the team.
Bouchner has a grand vision for MealMe.
“Consumers are going to be able to see what’s on the menu of restaurants and send an order into that store from within ChatGPT, a TV, a car, everything,” he said. “But there needs to be an infrastructure layer. We’re that infrastructure layer. Even if a company doesn’t want to build its own front end, we have a software-development kit, which is just a couple lines of code. Then boom, you’ve stood up ordering. And if a company wants to have its own user interface, it can use our API.”
It would take the brain of Carl Sagan to comprehend all the eCommerce possibilities at play in this universe. But Bouchner is energized by the scope of it all.
“What’s cool is that start-ups are so creative about helping consumers find food,” he said. “There’s also nutrition, fitness applications, and all of these new consumer apps that are coming along. I can’t even begin to predict what the next big idea is. What I want to be is the shover builder for the people who are having these ideas.”
