I just got a chance to interview Ooshma Garg, Founder & CEO of Gobble, last Friday June 3rd, as I was heading to JFK airport for my own roadshow starting in Stockholm, Sweden. Gobble is a company that prepares fresh 10-minute gourmet dinner kits with 3-step instructions, and delivers these dinner kits right to your doorstep. Ooshma was eloquent and forthcoming and her story was interesting to say the least.
Prior to 2008, Garg was the president of Stanford Women in Business. She organized career advancement workshops and opportunities for 400+ female members of the organization. Her experience inspired her to establish Anapata, her first company, in 2008 when she was still in junior year. An online student recruiting platform, Anapata was focused on law students and law firms since these groups are quite slow in embracing online recruitment. Garg sold Anapata in 2010 to a law firm. In that same year she was named as one of Inc. Magazine's Top 30 Under 30 Entrepreneurs.
Garg was busy at Stanford, attending to her classes and her previous organization when the idea of Gobble emerged. She was eating out most of the time, and her intense schedule left her no time to eat healthy. She was tired of eating fast food in her car, so she went on Craigslist and asked if there was anyone willing to cook for her at $8 a plate. She was surprised with the response she received. She was on a mission to create the easiest way for everyone to access healthy home cooked meals. Having solved the problem of healthy home-cooked meals for herself, eventually led her to found her breakout company Gobble in 2010. She developed innovative 10-minute fresh dinner kits for delivery to your home.
With a degree in BioMechanical Engineering, Garg thinks differently about food. She applies a mechanically data-driven approach in collecting and understanding consumer taste preferences. She wanted her company to be the modern family's default definition of dinner, delivering the perfect menu of dinner kits for each unique family every week.
Gobble is similar to competitors like Blue Apron and Plated for all of them provide a selection of meals each week and then deliver the recipes and pre-portioned ingredients in refrigerated containers to subscribers' homes. However, with Gobble there's very little actual cooking involved. With kitchens and warehouses in California,, Gobble is able to prepare ingredients - to be pre-portioned, pre-chopped, pre-mixed and pre-cooked, so users just stir and serve. Clients can finish preparing the whole dish/meal within about 10 minutes. Cleaning takes up only 15-20 minutes.
These meals are favorites for single parent families with children, and even for families with both parents working. For instance, one Stanford mom with a 5-year old daughter had used Gobble meals for 76 weeks straight. Before the Gobble meals came into the picture, she used to spend 1.5-2 hours preparing their meals and the kids wouldn't eat until 8pm. Gobble now allows her time to play with her child for 1.5 hours instead of preparing the meals.
Ooshma captured the professional kitchen preparation work, and now brings this to families that want to act as a head chef for their children. Most recipes can be cooked within 10 minutes in one pan. The company charges $12 per meal if you order six or more meals per week, or $14 if you order four meals.
Gobble is in several states and today has the capacity to reach up to 30 million people. It is currently in Washington State, California, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Idaho. It is coming to NYC end of the summer.
The company has raised $10.75 million in Series A funding by high profile VCs, including early investors in Starbucks, Jamba Juice, and Trinity Ventures, the man behind Vitamin Water and Smart Water, as well as several other iconic brands associated with Rohan Oza and Andreessen Horowitz. Personally I feel this resolves and combines parents desire for quality time and potential quality food for their kids.
Note: All images are credited to Pixabay.com
Disclaimer: The author has no interest or investments in the mentioned company in this article.