Lollipop offers an app that centralises meal planning, grocery shopping and cooking guidance, targeting busy families—particularly those with children. The product is built around a recommendation engine and a ‘Community Picks’ feature that surfaces ideas from the user base. Shoppers can add from roughly 30,000 ingredients to baskets and schedule delivery slots via partner Sainsbury’s. Founder Tom Foster-Carter, a former Curve co-founder and Monzo COO, leads the company and emphasises design and user experience. To date the startup has driven about £6 million into users’ shopping carts and plans to expand its partner integrations. Lollipop expects to double headcount from 20 to 40 by year-end as it fleshes out the product offering. Lollipop AI is launching a public beta of a British online grocery marketplace that enables users to build meal plans from recipes and automatically collects the required ingredients into shopping baskets while suggesting household essentials. The platform is built as a marketplace partnering with retailers including Sainsbury’s and content partner BBC Good Food, with fulfillment handled by retail partners. Its business model will take a small commission from retail partners and allow selected advertising from CPG brands; the site is free to use with a planned premium tier and the first 10K beta testers offered premium features for life. The founding team includes former employees of Monzo, Farmdrop, Amazon, Sainsbury’s and HelloFresh, and founder Tom Foster-Carter says the product can save several hours a week for the average household. Lollipop claims 80% of households spend over an hour a week meal-planning and online grocery shopping, and positions itself to help with health goals, reduce food waste, and compete with recipe-box and meal-planning rivals. The company has raised a pre-seed round (amount undisclosed) backed by JamJar Investments, Speedinvest and a group of grocery/technology backers including Ian Marsh and super angels Charles Songhurst and Ed Lando; future plans include a cooking companion app due next month and expansion of retail and delivery partners.

Total raised

$6M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

May 2022