For food-related businesses, the process of staying on top of various food safety regulations and ensuring compliance is cumbersome and bureaucratic. As a result, the companies struggle, and supermarkets and restaurants do not have good compliance visibility down the food supply chain.
Based in Tallinn, FoodDocs, a compliance-as-a-service solution for digital food safety management, enables food suppliers to create and manage their mandatory food safety related processes and documentation quickly, easily, and in digitised way, providing transparency through the whole supply chain.
The startup has raised €300k in seed capital in a round led by United Angels VC, with participation from angel investors Timo Rein (co-founder & CEO of Pipedrive), Märt Kelder (early Skype employee and first investor in Taxify), Martin Rand (co-founder of Vitalfields) and others. As food safety regulations are uniform in the EU, Fooddocs plans to use the new funding to expand throughout Europe.
Fooddocs was founded in 2016 by two female entrepreneurs, Katrin Liivat and Karin Repp, both food technologists and restaurateurs. The pair saw that both food-related SMEs and retail chains did not have an easy-to-use solution for creating and keeping track of necessary food safety procedures. Companies had to produce and maintain lots of paperwork that became out-to-date fast, missed regulatory updates and did not provide good overview both for internal and for external inspection.
“With Fooddocs, we have solved one of the most painful issues food-related companies have,” said Fooddocs co-founder Katrin Liivat. “So far, creating and managing food safety required either hiring a consultant or spending days of investigating the regulations and writing down the processes. Fooddocs provides a digital environment for that, allows template-based creation, sharing, and updating of food safety compliance processes with minimal effort. Fooddocs’ ‘digital quality stamp’ provides transparency throughout the whole value chain.”
The company already boasts large European retailers such as Stockmann, S-Group (the group managing Prisma) and Dussmann as customers, along with hundreds of cafes, restaurants and SMEs that process food.
“FoodDocs ensures continuity and provides confidence that all necessary food safety documents are digital and up-to-date,” said Marge Turner, the general manager of Stockmann. “The solution makes the same data available for people working in the food department, office managers, and inspection officials, and saves us substantial amount of time and money.”
