The problem

The consumer food landscape is saturated with cheap, ultra-processed ‘junk’ food. Healthier, fresh alternatives are not only harder to come by but are also available only at a considerably higher price.

This disparity is a signal of the waste risk that food businesses associate with short shelf-life products. To protect against margin loss due to overproduction of fresh stock, businesses pass on higher costs for these items to the consumer (compared to processed longer life lines), and defensively undershoot their stock estimates for (or even stop selling altogether) certain fresh products, meaning fresh options can be few and far between.

This is a huge problem for the health and equitability of our food system, and represents an enormous missed opportunity for food businesses.

Whilst forecasting products already exist to help businesses predict future sales of other consumer goods, there is currently no accurate solution for forecasting fresh products to service rising consumer demand. Fresh food forecasting is an entirely different ball game because: 

• Demand is irregular, making it hard to spot patterns in (as preference for fresh items is delicately shaped by contextual factors like the weather, and the day of the week, with consumption happening shortly after purchase)

• Every location is different (hyper-localised influences like affluence, footfall and competitive alternative food options make it difficult to transpose demand information from one location to another, meaning insights captured in one setting may not apply elsewhere)

• Accuracy is paramount (there is no overstock safety net for products which go off)

The team

Harry Slagel (CEO & Co-Founder)

Harry is a second-time founder in the food industry, having previously founded Plateaway, the UK’s largest restaurant meal kit marketplace which reached £700k revenue in its first 12 months. His background is in UX and service design, having worked at Sky, as well as on a number of digital transformation projects for the UK government with roles at HMCTS where he worked within the digital reform to redesign the Immigration and asylum appeals process, and at the Department of Education to define how remote schooling could work during COVID. 

Lucy Adams (COO & Co-Founder)

Lucy brings extensive commercial and operational experience from her background in early-stage startups, most notably as an early employee at rapid grocery delivery startup Weezy. As one of the founding team also at Shareback, a B2B SaaS disruptor, she has experience taking a SaaS product from idea to execution, has led development as a product manager and has also hired an early technical team. 

Additionally, Lucy brings both a rich knowledge and academic network in food systems research and nutrition from her time studying Human Sciences at Oxford University. Prior to joining the Mission Studio, she was an entrepreneur in residence at ZINC, where she spent 6 months conducting user research with food businesses. 

What Martee's wants to get out of the programme

• Continued support to shape and deliver their proprietary data product

• Guidance in their growth, brand and marketing approach, to refine their messaging and proposition

• Support with orchestrating their multi-step product roadmap, to optimise their go to market strategy for both their consumer and business-facing products

• Preparation for their next external fundraising round, which will be announced very soon…