Skip to main content

Spoon University Raises $2M To Serve A Food Network To Millennials



A who’s-who of early stage investors are putting a $2 million bet that two young Northwestern grads can teach millennials a better way to eat with their new startup Spoon University.

Founded by Mackenzie Barth (not a foodie) and Sarah Adler (total foodie), New York-based Spoon University is a crowd-sourced, would-be Food Network for millennials, according to Barth, who serves as the company’s chief executive.

“We’re building it from within the community,” Barth says. “We have 3,000 college students around the country who are building up content. They all volunteer. What motivates them is this whole food movement.”

Like every other demographic, twenty and early-thirty somethings want to embrace healthy eating and living, and Spoon University wants to be their source for tips, tricks, food reviews, and content. Popular stories on the site include “18 Facts Every Tofu Newbie Should Know” and “11 #SpoonFeed Ice Cream Concoctions That Are Dope AF” (not necessarily your typical FoodTV fare).

The vision was enough to capture the attention (and dollars) of investors led by SoftTech VC. Additional financing came from Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Box Group, VaynerRSE, BBG Ventures, MATH fund, Joanne Wilson, Howard Morgan, Project Mayhem Ventures, Kosinski Ventures and RuggedVC.

Unlike other contributed content platforms, Spoon University isn’t open to everyone. Members who want to apply goes through an on-boarding process and receives training in how to write headlines, use Facebook to promote their content, and manage analytics tools to see how well their contributions are performing.

Spoon University launched as a magazine at Northwestern in the fall of 2012, while both women were still undergraduates. The two went on to launch a website in 2013, and began receiving requests from people at other schools on how to get a similar publication going.

The two women got a much different education in the most recent Techstars program in New York. They graduated from the accelerator’s most recent, April cohort.

“What we had been doing was manually launching these new chapters,” says Barth. “So we created this one place called secret sauce… Now we’re able to launch new content pretty seamlessly and we’re able to train people all in one place.

Like Buzzfeed and other new flavors of publishing, Spoon University wants to leverage its content creators to develop packages for brands, and use their on-campus presence to do experiential marketing to college users.  The site now averages 1.5mm monthly unique visitors.

“The magic behind Spoon University and the engine with which we run our business is ‘Secret Sauce’”, said Spoon University co-Founder and CTO Sarah Adler in a statement. “Our proprietary onboarding, training, and analytics system has enabled us to expand from one chapter at Northwestern in 2013 to over 100 university chapters in the US, Canada, and India.”

The company said it would use the new financing to continue to expand its network of contributors and begin creating more video content.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...
1 comment
Read more

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...
1 comment
Read more