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We’re delighted to share our investment in Appetise’s A$7m Series A alongside our friends at OIF, Icehouse, NZVC and K1W1.
Appetise is building the intelligence layer between recipe inspiration and grocery checkout to empower FMCG brands with actionable insights.
Founded in New Zealand and now operating across ANZ, Appetise is tackling a universal household problem: the weekly grocery shop. What should be simple remains fragmented. Consumers bounce between recipe websites, handwritten lists, retailer apps and clunky checkout flows. Appetise connects those steps into one seamless experience, turning meal inspiration into an automated shopping list, comparing real-time pricing across major supermarkets, and pushing baskets directly through to checkout.
While the consumer experience is super valuable, the deeper opportunity sits on the other side of the marketplace. Appetise captures verified behavioural data at the moment decisions are made - when households plan meals, add products to lists, and complete their shop. That data becomes incredibly valuable for FMCG brands seeking to understand not just what is sold, but why.
We believe Appetise is emerging at the right time. FMCG marketers are under pressure to prove ROI, defend shelf space, and justify spend across retail media and shopper marketing channels. Traditional scan data shows transactions after the fact. Surveys rely on claimed behaviour. Retail media networks operate within closed ecosystems. Appetise sits earlier in the journey , at the planning and intent stage, capturing leading indicators of purchase behaviour in a way incumbents cannot.
Why we invested
- Strong growth trajectory with signs of market validation: Appetise has strong momentum, growing revenue by almost ~3x in six months to ~$3.5m while signing some of the largest names in food retail. This growth has been rapid, validating genuine market pull for the company's behavioural panel data.
- Unique data asset with structural defensibility: Proprietary data is the new gold. Appetise has built a 4+ year longitudinal dataset of verified consumer behaviour tied to completed grocery shops creating a growing data moat. Appetise’s access to a consistent live dataset or panel of ~100k customers (and growing) who are planning & executing their weekly grocery shops is providing real-time insights into customer demand and trends across a variety of metrics (demographics, locations etc). FMCG brands use this data to improve consumer experience and to drive more shoppers toward their products.
- Strong founding team executing with discipline: Toby and Elise Hilliam have demonstrated resilience by pivoting the business model and achieving rapid product market fit. The team has scaled efficiently, building processes and infrastructure that support current growth while preparing for scale. Recent key hires including Lorena Casillas (ex-Canva, ~8 years performance marketing) and Clinton Duncan (Mastercard, agency background), strengthen go to market capabilities. The Chairman of the Board, Craig Irwin, is a former Managing Director of Circana, one of the world's largest FMCG data and analytics company, providing deep category expertise.
Problem
For consumers, shopping for groceries is still too complex. You juggle recipe sites and books, manual lists, price checks, and clunky retailer checkouts. The path from deciding what to cook to getting groceries delivered or ordered forces you to plan meals, check the pantry, copy ingredients, match them to products, compare prices, confirm availability, and then manage separate checkout flows. This creates abandoned carts, wasted time, and planning fatigue. Current options fall short. Recipe apps do not connect to groceries, meal kits reduce choice at a premium price, and retailer platforms offer weak meal-planning tools. Consumers need one intelligent platform that links recipe inspiration to grocery purchase with automated lists, real time pricing, and fast / integrated checkout across preferred retailers.
For brands, FMCG marketers face the constant challenge of having to prove ROI on marketing spend and demonstrate consumer insights to retailers, whilst their existing tools cannot deliver.
It is almost impossible to show ROI on marketing spend. Retailers demand more consumer insight than brands can provide. Decisions about New Product Development, category strategy, and media often rely on gut feel rather than data. Marketers lack visibility into how consumers actually plan, shop, and decide in real life, creating a disconnect between brand strategy and consumer reality.
Solution
Appetise has built a dual-sided platform that connects what people cook to what they buy, creating verified behavioural data that powers growth for FMCG brands. Unlike traditional research firms that rely on claimed survey responses or scan data showing past purchases, Appetise captures real consumer behaviour at the moment of decision, when people plan meals and build shopping lists.
The platform creates a closed loop from inspiration to purchase to insight. Consumers use Appetise to discover recipes, which automatically convert into shopping lists with products matched to their preferred retailers.
Consumer experience:
The consumer platform centres on making grocery shopping effortless through intelligent meal planning. Users browse or import recipes from any source, drop into a personalised meal plan, Appetise automatically converts into shopping lists with real-time pricing comparison across retailers and adding to basket with key grocery retailers such as Coles or Woolworths. The platform handles product matching, localisation by region, and availability checking, eliminating the friction between recipe inspiration and actual purchase.
Brand experience:
Appetise helps FMCG brands turn food inspiration into measurable sales and actionable intelligence. Brands embed products directly into the high performing recipes, driving trial and purchase with closed-loop attribution from inspiration to checkout. Every placement generates verified behavioural data on what actually converts - giving brands clear ROI they can demonstrate to leadership and retail partners. Beyond activation, Appetise delivers always-on shopper intelligence, revealing “Share of Occasion” insights that traditional scan data misses, showing which meals, contexts, and moments drive purchase, plus switching behaviour, demographics, and category trends to inform planning and NPD.
Underpinning this is Appetise’s proprietary Occasion Graph, a defensible data asset linking people, meals, products, retailers, and outcomes. This powers predictive models, real-time stock visibility to quantify lost sales, and workflow tools that sales teams use daily to drive retail action. As more shoppers transact, the data becomes richer and more accurate, creating a self-reinforcing advantage. With automation, brand data integrations, and the upcoming “Ask My Data” AI assistant, Appetise is evolving into a scalable, self-serve growth platform that combines media, measurement, and intelligence in one system.
We are stoked to be working with Toby, Elise and the team. Here's to a category defining new company!
Read more in the Forbes announcement and join the platform here.
Safe Travels,
The TEN13 Team