Jakarta’s home-cooking delivery startup Black Garlic boxes up seed funding

If you enjoy cooking meals at home but don’t like battling traffic in Jakarta just to get to the supermarket, on-demand food delivery apps may be your thing. Naturally, you’ve got choices like Berry Kitchen, hyperlocal grocery service HappyFresh, and the on-demand courier option from Go-Jek. But there’s also another startup we’ve kept an eye on.

Late last week, Jakarta-based meal kit delivery service Black Garlic told Tech in Asia that it received a seed funding round of an undisclosed amount from local venture capital firms Convergence Ventures and Skystar Capital. The money will be used to scale up the company’s operations in the Jakarta metro area, and to diversify Black Garlic’s offerings.

Co-founders Michael Saputra and Olivia Wongso are no strangers to Indonesia’s food and beverage industry. Michael, Black Garlic’s CEO, is also the co-founder of Jakarta’s Klik-Eat, an online food delivery firm that he sold to his Japanese investors in September 2014.

Olivia, on the other hand, knows food. Her father, William Wongso, is a serial restaurateur and one of Indonesia’s most famous culinary experts. He is recognized throughout the nation, and even had his own cooking show on national television. This makes Olivia, Black Garlic’s chief product officer, a well-connected person in the nation’s culinary game.

Black Garlic’s team prepares its menu for the week.

See: There’s a new meal-kit delivery service in Jakarta. I gave it a try.

Nerds at the laptop, chefs in the kitchen

Black Garlic has a similar concept to Blue Apron in the US, a firm that aims to make home cooking accessible to everyone. But while Blue Apron focuses on high-quality ingredients and a nice cooking experience, Michael says Black Garlic is instead geared toward solving a problem for people in Indonesia’s urban areas. According to the team, Black Garlic’s service is designed to make the idea of home cooking a simple decision, rather than a daunting trip to the grocery store, or an activity that will take up a lot of time at home.

Michael and Olivia say the kind of people who use Black Garlic are middle-class affluent consumers, who want to take care of their meals for roughly two to three days out of the work week. Michael adds that the service is also great for families that have live-in maids who cook, as the instructions in each box can show them how to prepare each dish.

“A lot of the customers have maids, then they suddenly become super maids,” Michael quips.

Olivia adds that Black Garlic currently has around 1,000 customers who have tried the product. Of that number, the team claims 50 percent are active users, meaning they’ve placed an order in the past three months. That said, Black Garlic has only been running for a few months, so it may still be too early to project its success based on the current number of active users.

Matrimony of tech and taste