Professional kitchens around the world start each morning by going through the day’s menu to determine if they have the necessary ingredients to cook the meals. Based on this assessment, they start ordering from different suppliers using phones, faxes and computers as well as going to the market to pick up products. This is a necessary but ineffective way of purchasing the items a restaurant needs, and Sourcery, an online wholesale food supplier director and payments processor, was created to deliver a more effective way for food service operators to order, pay and keep track of all their transactions with suppliers. The Y Combinator-backed startup came out of private beta and also raised a total of $2.5 million in seed funding to expand its platform to new markets.
Finding and managing suppliers in a digital format has been very difficult for food companies, restaurants, caterers, and corporate kitchens, which are still using paper and the inconveniences that entails. Sourcery has simplified the process so much it is just like ordering a product on Amazon.
The company’s website lists all the category of products and the available items along with the corresponding prices, so all the user has to do is click and purchase the products they need. The app handles payments along with detailed information about the order history including what was purchased, when and the method of payment, which can be exported to Quickbooks. If the business doesn’t want to digitize their accounting, Sourcery allows the customer to export the information as a traditional invoice so it can be printed.
According to Techcrunch, the company is looking to expand to Los Angeles, Portland, and New York City in January of next year as it already has customers in those cities but they are not being served. In the meantime it is in the process of bringing aboard 55 companies that are on its waitlist.
Sourcery was founded in 2012 by Moran and Peretz Partensky, and is based in San Francisco. The company raised its seed funding from several angel investors, including Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Yammer CTO Adam Pisoni, Techstars co-founder and Box (News - Alert) Group Investor David Tisch, Box Group’s Adam Rothenberg, Postini founder Shinya Akamine, Jeff Epstein, Oracle’s former CFO and board member of The Priceline Group, the California Endowment, and Y Combinator.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
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