SpoonRocket
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
SpoonRocket was a Bay Area on-demand meal delivery startup, founded in June 2013 by UC Berkeley graduates Anson Tsui and Steven Hsiao. It cooked meals in its own kitchens and delivered chef-made food - four rotating options a day, breakfast included - within about 10 minutes, for roughly $8 a meal. By controlling the whole process from kitchen to heated delivery vehicles, it positioned itself as 'the food button' to Uber's taxi button, expanding from Berkeley and Emeryville across San Francisco, the East Bay, and Seattle. The company raised $13.5 million from investors including Foundation Capital, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator.
02 / SpoonRocket FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
SpoonRocket was killed by the economics of the on-demand wars. It faced intense competition from fellow meal-delivery startups like Sprig and Munchery plus restaurant-delivery upstarts like Postmates, Caviar, and DoorDash, all racing for scale in a saturated market. Even though the company eventually reached positive unit economics on each order, the cost of operations exceeded the funding it could raise, and the funding environment kept tightening. Acquisition talks with an unnamed quick-service restaurant chain fell through at the last minute. In its farewell note, the company said it had 'explored all strategic options till the very last minute but unfortunately, they all fell through'.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
SpoonRocket was founded.
- Recorded event
The structured record contains an event involving SpoonRocket, but does not support additional detail.
- Operations ended
SpoonRocket ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
SpoonRocket announced it would shut down as of Tuesday, March 15, 2016, after failing to secure the funding needed to continue operating.
- 02
Days after the shutdown, Brazil-based iFood bought the company's delivery-logistics technology to improve its own delivery times and order tracking - an asset purchase, not a revival of the brand.
- 03
The company had raised $13.5 million in funding and, per reporting, was planning to liquidate material assets to repay a portion of what it owed creditors, with no capital left to return to investors.
- 04
No public disclosure of a realized net loss figure by a defined subject, period, and basis was found; the $13.5 million raised is a funding figure, not a documented loss.