Foodles raises another $10 million for its cloud canteen

French startup Foodles is raising a $10 million funding round (€9 million). The company provides canteen-like services using connected fridges and daily deliveries.

Creadev, DN capital and Adelie are participating in today’s round. This isn’t just fresh capital as existing shareholder Elior is selling its shares in the company. Elior is a large catering and foodservice company — in some way, Elior and Foodles are competitors at a very different scale.

Foodles solves a specific issue for the French market. French companies have to subsidize lunch for their employees. They have two options — they can either open a canteen in the office or hand out meal vouchers to financially contribute to everyone’s lunch.

While big public companies usually work with a foodservice company, such as Elior, the upfront investment is too important for most small companies. Foodles addresses small companies with its full-stack solution.

When you sign up to Foodles, the company delivers connected fridges to your office. Every day, Foodles comes to your office to deliver 20 to 200 meals at once. By default, you get a handful of options.

Employees can then unlock the fridge by scanning a card, grab something and eat. They’re then charged automatically. It usually costs way less than ordering something on Deliveroo for instance.

If you want something different, you can also order a specific meal in the Foodles app. You can top up your account from the app as well.

With today’s funding round, the startup plans to double the size of the team and expand beyond the Paris area. And it’s also worth noting that Foodles is currently profitable thanks to positive unit economics — one delivery represents dozens of meals after all.

Recently, there have been many scandals about riders for food startups, such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Glovo and Frichti. They are underpaid, overworked and have to take many risks in order to generate a decent wage. Foodles knows that this is a key issue and promises that delivery people are full-time employees.

So far, the company has managed to convince 50 companies to switch to Foodles. The startup delivers around 5,000 meals per day. Foodles says that it plans to have a more aggressive sales strategy to sign more customers in the coming months.