An interview with Riya Grover and Lyz Swanton, founders of Feedr, one of Forward Fooding’s top 500 Food Tech startups.

Riya Grover and Lyz Swanton, founders of Feedr

It’s time to put a face to the name…

We asked our FoodTech 500 top-runners to give us a bit of insight into how they started out as a company and their thoughts on the role of technology in Food innovation. Meet Riya and Lyz, the power-duo behind Feedr, who are on a mission to make it easier for people to access healthy, high quality meals at work. Let’s see what the founders had to say.

So tell us a little bit more about you! Where did the idea for your FoodTech company come from?

Riya: We created Feedr with the simple idea that healthy and transparent food should be easily accessible and affordable, and that data can be used to build a more customised menu experience. I was working at a startup and saw that the benefits landscape was not keeping pace with changing customer preferences around food and nutrition. Lyz was working at an investment firm, and struggled with overly processed high-street food options being the only things she could find to eat. We were introduced by a mutual friend and now one of our top vendors, and the rest is history.

How is tech central to your business?

Riya and Lyz: We are fundamentally a technology platform connecting individuals to a variety of meal choices. We’ve built an experience that is simple and convenient for all parties – the employees ordering meals, the companies adopting the service and the vendors we partner with. Tech is central to making this process work and therefore underpins everything we do, from the customer experience to order fulfilment. We use machine learning to optimise and personalise menus for people, allowing us to provide an increasingly tailored experience for our customers as they use the service. It also allows us to predict demand for specific meals and ingredients more accurately, which is fed back to our community of vendors to better control supply and reduce food waste. Tech is also integral for scaling the business. By automating all of the aspects of fulfilment, we’re able to fulfil thousands of orders daily with a very lean team.

Why do you think it’s important to see the food industry embrace tech?

Riya and Lyz: Utilising tech is a vital component to building any successful business today because it can unlock growth, speed up processes and help you to run more efficiently. For food specifically, being in the online space allows you to share much more information and transparency about the contents of a meal and its supply chain. As consumer trends shift, this is increasingly important. Tech also allows us to bring down costs across the value chain and reduce waste, which is really exciting. In our case, it means we can produce in response to actual demand and batch orders based on users locations, but for other companies within the industry it can facilitate a whole host of other developments.

Want to know more? Check out Feedr’s full profile here.

Congratulations again to Feedr for ranking 8th in the “Food Delivery” category of the Foodtech 500 list.

To find out who else made it into the FoodTech 500; the top Food Tech companies in the world, click here.

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