Housebites Cooks Up A Storm As The New Airbnb-For-Takeout [TCTV]

I must admit I was skeptical when Housebites first launched last year. It seemed a quaint little business attacking a hugely established market but in a way which looked, as least from the outside, to be unscalable. The premise of Housebites is this: the average person likes the convenience of take-out food (in the UK it’s called takeaway) but the food itself is usually unhealthy and processed. So why not capture all those wanna-be chefs, connect them with customers via location and, voila, you capture a potentially big business? It seemed all very well, but I figured they’d find a handful of chefs, but vetting them would be too slow. After all, Airbnb had scaled because anyone could register their apartment and start trading. How do you do that with your kitchen when you might actually poison someone?

I’m happy to say I was wrong – Housebites is now growing at a fair clip, now with 10,000 registered users. As CEO and founder Simon Prockter told me in the interview below, Housebites has tapped into a very disruptive model which could well change the whole restaurant industry. But more of that in a moment.