Week 48 | Graze

Founded: 2007

Headquarters: London

Investors: Arts Alliance, DFJ Esprit, Octopus Ventures, The Accelerator Group

Website: www.graze.com

If there has been one popular theme that's popped up more than any other across the Nifty Fifties this year, it's that mother is the necessity of invention. Or something. Either way, the latest venture capital-backed business to grace these pages is graze.com, an online food company that is the result of seven friends noticing that their (pun alert) appetite (brilliant) need for tasty, convenient food wasn't being met by the market.

Instead of whinging about it, they teamed up, quit their jobs and started a company. This was in 2007. In January 2009 it officially went live and in doing so became the first company to deliver healthy food by post in the UK. In its first month Graze sent out over 8,000. Six months later it was delivering 80,000.

The majority of this growth has been through word of mouth and recommendation: graze.com fans so enjoy the variety of foods that they get sent that many of them post blog entries and tweet about the contents of their boxes. Operating from a head office in Richmond in West London and with a kitchen just down the road in Feltham, the graze.com website lets customers select their favourite foods from a range of 150 different items ranging from fresh pineapple to wasabi peanuts and dried berries and then have them delivered in a box by first class.

The company is led by CEO Graham Bosher, co-founder of LOVEFiLM, and chaired non-executively by William Reeve, another co-founder of LOVEFiLM. The LOVEFiLM connection doesn't stop merely at some of the personnel; it also stretches to the investors and neatly demonstrates what happens when a VC finds an entrepreneur they like and trust. After receiving some early investment from Arts Alliance and angel investors like Robin Klein - both investors in Graham's previous business - graze.com raised £2m in July 2009 in a round led by Octopus Ventures and supported by DFJ Esprit (yep, another LOVEFiLM backer) as well as some existing investors.

Why so popular with VCs? Handing over to Nic Brisbourne, a partner at DFJ Esprit:

• The market: food is a huge market (eating at work in the UK is around £19bn) and Graze plays on the trend within that towards healthy eating - a trend which has already spawned a number of successful companies including Innocent Drinks here in the UK;
• The product: through a mix of high quality ingredients and beautiful packaging graze's product has really hit a sweet spot with consumers - check out what people are saying on Twitter, and more importantly the way they are voting with their wallets as evidenced in the chart below ;
• The team: everything about the operations at graze reek of high quality execution - from the back end logistics, through the website front end to the customer acquisition processes everything is done well - so this is a great team.  Moreover, Graham Bosher, CEO and Will Reeve, chairman are individuals we have known for some time and had previous success with at LOVEFiLM.

There's plenty more over at Nic's blog post here but the message is clear: graze.com is a company that is definitely going places and another great example of British entrepreneurialism at its finest.