Appetise
Appetise is a meal planning and grocery shopping app for households across Australia and New Zealand.
- Category
- Consumer and Marketplace
- Fund
- NZVC I & NZVC II
- Website
- appetise.io
- On TechMates
- 2 episodes
What Appetise does
Appetise offers personalized recipes based on taste, diet and budget, builds a one-touch shopping list from them, and checks that list out with major supermarkets including New World, PAK'nSAVE, Coles and Woolworths. Toby and Elise Hilliam founded it in Christchurch as MenuAid, and it is free for households. The company sells aggregated shopping and preference insights to grocery and food brands instead. Planning the week before the shop is also what cuts household food waste.
The secret
The households are not the customer. Making the app free is what built a panel large enough to sell basket insight to FMCG brands, so the people planning dinner fund the business by using it rather than by paying for it.
Why NZVC invested in Appetise
We backed Appetise because meal planning sits at the center of a large, recurring consumer habit, and the team turned a genuinely useful free app into a data business that food brands pay for. Elise and Toby Hilliam built real engagement first, then found a durable way to monetize the panel without charging the households that rely on it. The combination of consumer traction across Australia and New Zealand and strong demand from grocery and CPG companies for shopper insight gave us conviction in the timing.
Appetise in the press
- Appetise seeks bite of Trump's AmericaNBR · 14 May 2026
- Grocery app saves family of eight up to $150 a shop but comes with Consumer NZ warningNZ Herald · 14 April 2026
- Appetise raised $7 million to sell grocery insights to food brandsForbes Australia, SmartCompany · 19 February 2026
- MenuAid became Appetise after a NZ$4 million pre-Series AStartup Daily · 15 August 2024
- Meal planning app proves appetising for Australasian investorsNBR · 13 August 2024
Appetise on TechMates
Why Brand Is the Only Moat Left in SaaS
You hear brand architect Simon Pound argue that as AI commoditizes software features, brand and community become the moat that cannot be copied. He traces his path from radio and TV through advertising to building brands at Vend, then explains the rebrands behind Appetise and ERA, and where the real margin now sits.
“If you can describe the entire function of a product in three sentences and it's repeatable, they're cooked. All the margin is gone.”Simon Pound
- At Vend, Simon championed independent retailers with real actions, from a retail-district takeover to a collaboration beer dropped into every store.
- MenuAid rebranded to Appetise when it shifted from a paid menu app to free, monetizing behavior-based B2B food insights; the relaunch lifted free users 20% overnight.
- He vibe-coded his own version of DocSend in half an hour, arguing that a product you can describe in three sentences has margins that go to cents on the dollar.
Appetise on TechMates
This Startup Knows What You'll Eat Next
You hear how a student side business fixing flat damage turned into a company food brands use to predict what people will eat next. Toby Skilton covers the COVID pivot, a hard exit, and the mistake most founders make chasing ideas.
- How Appetise revolutionizes food insights.
- Achieving real product-market fit.
- Using AI to predict food trends.