Recipe kit delivery startup Gousto has raised £10 million

Recipe kit delivery service Gousto has raised £10 million from investors as it looks to take on the likes of HelloFresh in the increasingly busy food delivery market.

The funding round, which includes BGF Ventures, Unilever Ventures, MMC Ventures, Angel CoFund, and Barclays, comes less than a year after Gousto's £9 million Series B round.

Gousto, which employs 200 people in London and Lincolnshire, has built a platform that allows people to select meals they like the look of from online weekly menus and get the recipes - along with their pre-portioned ingredients - delivered directly to their house.

You can either order enough ingredients for two people or four people. Each meal costs from £3.75 per person, depending on how many meals you order and how many people each meal is for. In addition to main meals, Gousto also delivers wine, desserts, and healthy snacks for kids.

The four-year-old company, founded by former hedge fund manager Timo Boldt, said it currently delivers almost 100,000 meals each week to customers across the UK.

Timo Boldt, CEO and founder of Gousto, said in a statement: "Gousto is on a mission to eliminate food waste. We can only achieve our mission if we make customers' lives easier, better and more natural. This means giving customers the most recipe choice and discovery of new cuisines.

"We offer the fastest turnaround time and delivery options, delivering incredibly fresh, seasonal, and high quality food. The additional funding will allow Gousto to accelerate our efforts to create the very best customer experience, and allow us to achieve our food waste mission. It's really simple, but this way we please our customers, build a sustainable business, and do good in the world."

But the firm faces stiff competition from Berlin rival HelloFresh, which has raised over $275 million (£226 million) from the likes of Rocket Internet and VC firm HV Holtzbrinck Ventures.

When asked what differentiates Gousto from HelloFresh, Boldt said: "You have to wait up to eight days for delivery. And you cannot add wine, dessert or anything else. In contrast, Gousto offers the most recipe choice, the most delivery flexibility, and almost 100 additional products to choose from to really have awesome cooking experiences. From a business point of view, Gousto is owned by its team, whilst Hellofresh is owned by Rocket Internet, which matters as we are determined to build a culture of ownership focusing relentlessly on long term sustainability.

"But at the end of the day, I'm very thankful for HelloFresh to be around. Most companies have ten competitors, we only have one serious competitor, which means we are not alone at building category awareness. And what's most important is that we operate in the £200bn grocery market, which has an online penetration of 5% going to 10% by 2020 (IGD). this is a seismic shift and we are in the best position possible to benefit from it in the long term."