vanilla bean | Overview

Ordering food online often means ordering lots of trash along with it. Nearly 50% of plastic waste produced worldwide comes from packaging. And plastic waste is a problem: 8 million tons of it end up in the oceans every year. There they form garbage patches, kill millions of marine animals, and enter our food chain as harmful microplastics. If we carry on like this, there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish by 2050.

It's time for a new way of delivering food

At vanilla bean, we are developing the world’s first environmentally friendly restaurant delivery service. We are focusing primarily on restaurants with a predominantly plant-based range of food and are completely dispensing with disposable packaging by establishing a unique system with our reusable vanilla bean boxes.

Customers order their desired food via the vanilla bean app. The food is delivered by bicycle courier in a fairly produced, reusable vanilla bean box. With the next order, the customer receives their food in a new box and simply returns the old one. The courier returns it to the next restaurant, where it is professionally cleaned. We track all the boxes so that we know whether there are enough boxes available in the restaurants at all times.

We, the founding team of vanilla bean, are experienced app developers and have been working together for over ten years. Three and a half years ago, we started developing the vanilla bean app as a restaurant guide for plant-based eateries. Our goal was to create a framework into which the delivery service can be integrated—and to build a comprehensive user and restaurant base that we can use strategically for the market launch of our delivery service.

We have achieved this goal: Our restaurant guide currently not only lists over 30,000 restaurants worldwide, but has gained more than 300,000 users in Germany, the UK, France, and the United States. Our target group is not limited to strict vegetarians and vegans, as awareness about sustainable consumption is also growing among the general population.

In the third quarter of 2019, we will launch the delivery service in Berlin, where 41 out of 53 restaurants contacted to date have already agreed to partner with us.
 We have also collected expressions of interest in other parts of Germany, including well-known restaurant chains.

By 2020, we intend to process 30,000 orders per month. At this order volume, we represent an extremely interesting acquisition target for the large delivery services. Delivery Hero alone bought 19 competitors in the last 7 years (e.g. Foodpanda for EUR 424 million).

With the help of the Companists, we will now take the next step: Bringing the world's first environmentally friendly restaurant delivery service to Berlin's streets and then quickly expanding the model to other cities and countries.