Smoked Kachemak Bay oysters, Bouchon Bakery Nutter Butter cookies, REAL prosciutto de Parma…Whoa, sorry for the daydream and culinary tease, but I was putting together my wish list for exotic foodstuffs that might one day land on my porch thanks to LoveWithFood. If you haven’t heard yet, LoveWithFood is a monthly subscription service that delivers a box of gourmet goodies to your door wherever you might live. Each box contains bites of “unique, hard-to-find” snacks.
Love with Food Boxes
Surprise and seasonal themes dictate the selection of delectable edibles. Checkout at this store runs from $12/month to $120/year. Members sample different goods, earn points toward free treats, and have access to time-limited discounts on full-sized products featured each month. Previous boxes have included treats like Spicey Honey Dusted Can Can Roasted Jumbo Cashews, organic YummyEarth lollipops, Mighty Leaf Chocolate Mint Truffle Tea, and escargot puffs. If you live off the grid, Love with Food hopes to provide your gourmet fix. The company also intends to be a place for discovering recipes from fellow foodies and chefs.
If gourmet goods don’t whet your appetite, perhaps the site will make your charitable stomach growl approval. For every box sent, Love with Food donates a meal to a food bank such as the Feeding America Network or Share Our Strength-No Kid Hungry.
Love with Food graduated from the 500 Startups Accelerator last year. It took the company only six months after launching to draw users in all 50 states. The site is growing quickly thanks to partnerships with publishers and bloggers. For example, Stephanie Quilao (of Back in Skinny Jeans fame) will release a book next September. Love with Food will include snacks meant to accompany workouts that have been featured by the blog author.
The Gourmand-Entrepreneur
Founder and CEO Aihui Ong has strong cravings. A Singapore native, she cut her entrepreneurial chops at the National University of Singapore and then the Warwick Business School. Before launching her company, she swallowed 8 years of enterprise consulting life then devoured Ruby on Rails. Since 2008, she’s been the Startup Pitch Director at Women 2.0, which looks to support female founders of technology startups. Every year, Women 2.0 holds a competition giving female founders a chance to pitch to more than 30 angel investors, VCs, and entrepreneurs.
Ong describes herself as 1 cup entrepreneur, 1/2 cup swimmer, 1/2 cup runner, 1 cup rails developer, 1 cup cook, 1 bag of smiles. After a $645K batch of seed funding, she might want to include 1 cup success. Maybe 2. Backers included Justin Kitch (Homestead founder), 500 Startups,TEEC Angel Fund, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Manish Chandra (Poshmark founder), Google engineer George Harik, LiveOps founder Douglas Feirstein, and Blue Run Ventures partner Jonathan Ebinger…
Gotta run. I hear the doorbell. Please, please, please let it be some of my beloved Garrett Popcorn from Chicago.
