Lollipop
A deliciously-smart shopping assistant
Funding stage: Seed
What Lollipop does
Lollipop is an online grocery shopping platform, letting you do the “big shop in little time”. They’re building a recipe-led shopping experience using intelligent tools to cut down the time it takes to do your weekly shop from over an hour to just a few clicks.
The team is creating the fastest, most enjoyable shopping experience for time-poor households, with grocery products from anywhere, in any timeframe. The initial product allows users to build meal plans using BBC Good Food recipes, assembling the ingredients automatically into an editable shopping basket fulfilled by Sainsbury’s, and then suggesting additional household essentials.
They’re also building towards a platform that lets the customer gather all of their food associated-spend from both big retailers and rapid delivery companies, with an AI powered recommendation engine to improve the customer experience, speed and reduce food wastage.
Why we like it
We’ve always wondered why online supermarkets don’t offer simple ‘recipe’ features that automatically collect items for a homemade meal! Households today have more options than ever when it comes to grocery shopping, yet meal planning is still a chore.
80% of households spend over an hour a week meal-planning and online grocery shopping, ordering from multiple sources for their food needs (e.g. rapid delivery, traditional supermarkets, recipe kits, ethnic and speciality supermarkets, and mission-led sources). This is a real pain point – predominantly for women who carry the responsibility and cognitive load of their household’s food needs even though they are more likely than ever to be also working outside the home.
What our fund managers say
“We believe that Lollipop can become the differentiated one-stop grocery shopping platform and unified data source of user’s behaviour around food, by starting with the biggest pain point today: Deciding what to eat, and purchasing the ingredients to cook those meals.”
– Rebecca Hunt – Principal
Who are we backing?
Tom Foster-Carter – Founder & CEO. Tom co-founded Osper and Curve and then was COO of Monzo. He has a strong track record of building highly scalable, product focused business, building and running big teams and raising funds.
Chris Parsons – Co-founder & CTO.Chris has a background in gaming and film, and worked for and ran his own software development consultancy. He brings more than 20 years of experience.
See more on Lollipop’s website here.