Tylor Jong, co-founder and CEO of TreeDots
TreeDots, a Singapore-based food surplus marketplace, has secured US$11 million in a Series A funding round co-led by East Ventures and California-based Amasia.
ACTIVE Fund, Seeds Capital, and angels, including bestselling writer Nir Eyal (the author of Hooked) and Singaporean actress Fiona Xie, also co-invested.
Founded in 2018 by Tylor Jong, Lau Jia Cai, and Nicholas Lim, TreeDots targets to tackle the “trillion-dollar” global problem of food waste and loss and reduce the carbon footprint associated with food wastage.
Also Read: Fixing food waste problem means less hungry people and a great economy
TreeDots redistributes unsold stocks from suppliers to businesses, such as restaurants and cafés, allowing them to source affordable food supplies. On the sell-side of the platform, suppliers would often pay money to send their surplus goods to the landfill, but now, they can earn incremental revenue for these goods when selling on Treedots.
The startup also provides logistical services, including cold-chain logistics service TreeLogs, and an online management app to assist suppliers as parts of its vertically integrated food supply chain ecosystem. This allows upstream suppliers to focus their efforts on food processing and manufacturing.
TreeDots has also set up a social commerce network that allows customers to buy these same products at discounted prices. In a group-buying approach, TreeDots delivers many orders to a single location, and neighbours pick up their items from this household.
The firm claims that this method helps save logistics costs for buyers and decreases emissions compared to a traditional e-commerce model.
Also Read: Singapore startup TreeDots clinches Judges’ Choice award at Echelon Asia 2018
With the mission to be a catalyst for a modern-day food supply chain in the region, TreeDots hopes to save two million tonnes of food that would have been wasted. By 2025, the company targets to cut carbon emissions by 18 million tonnes.
Last year, it expanded into Malaysia, with plans for more regional development in the future. To meet the new demand, the company recently expanded to logistics optimisation services to help enterprise customers build more efficient supply chains.
“Food loss is already a trillion-dollar problem, but what got us really excited was the fact that suppliers started to use the system for all of their revenue, not just food loss products,” said Roderick Purwana, managing partner at East Ventures.
Also read: Foodtech in Singapore through the eyes of startups
“We realised that a grocery chain might not buy a chicken that’s too big or has a broken bone because it looks funny on their shelves. But F&B outlets don’t care because they will cut it, plate it and make it look nice before serving. So if they can purchase essentially the same product at prices up to 90 per cent cheaper than alternatives, they are very happy,” said Tylor Jong, co-founder and CEO of TreeDots. “This original insight drove us to start an oversupplied foods marketplace to match supply and demand for these products.”
According to UN Environment Programme, one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted on a global scale, which is caused mainly by inefficient supply chains.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe also unveiled that methane emission, a greenhouse gas that is 86 times more detrimental to global warming than carbon dioxide, is attributed to the burning or decomposing of oversupplied foods.
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Image Credit: TreeDots
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