Cork food order app Peckish eyes expansion to Dublin

Founder of Peckish Paul O'Shea

Peckish is the latest company to join the booming food-tech space food-tech space but its founder Paul O’Shea is confident it will not get lost in the crowd and that it’s “the last food app you’ll ever have to download.” The start-up is competing with popular platforms such as JustEat and Deliveroo but he sees a unique market opportunity for his company which provides both a B2C and B2B service.

“We’re like Skyscanner except for food,” said Mr O’Shea.

The app markets different dishes to customers based on preference, dietary requirements and cost. For restaurants, it tailors menus and provides content creation which appears on social media sites.

“On the restaurant side, we have an easy to use menu management system that has been designed for the chefs and can provide consumers with more up-to-date ingredient information, allergen information, images, and how much it’s going to cost on different ordering platforms,” said Mr O’Shea.

Peckish was set up by Mr O’Shea in 2019 with plans to launch in the first quarter of 2020.

“But as you may remember, we had a global pandemic where all the restaurants were forced to close,” he said.

The company had its first full year of operations in 2021. Peckish now has 25 restaurants using the app in Cork, over 1000 menu items in the system, over 12,000 customers, and Mr O’Shea expects the business to hit its 20,000th search this week.

Mr O’Shea has indicated that he intends to ramp up operations of Peckish with a tweet he sent on Monday stating “it’s going to be a big week.” He told the Irish Examiner Peckish has a meeting this week with a leading social media platform to explore how it can develop its content creation service to restuarants.

The company is also currently raising €150,000 through crowdfunding platform Spark Crowdfund, and he predicts that Peckish will have secured at least €100,000 of this before the end of the week.

While Mr O’Shea is expecting a big week for Peckish, he seems also to be predicting a productive year for his company.

Mr O’Shea is planning to expand Peckish into Dublin during the summer months and aims to have 1,000 restaurants using the system by the end of the year.

“We’ll be moving the majority of the operations up there while also looking after our baby down here in Cork. As a Cork man, I’ve made sure of that,” said Mr O’Shea.

He added that Peckish will also be looking to raise seed-funding later this year to add to the €150,000 raised through crowdfunding and another €50,000 it received from Enterprise Ireland.

Employing more staff is also on the agenda for Peckish as at the moment it has only two full-time employees, including Mr O’Shea, along with some part-time content creators. However, the goal is to grow the team with five full-time and three part-time employees by July of this year.

Before it launches into Dublin and grows its team, there are a few kinks to be worked out first stated Mr O’Shea.

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Peckish is currently collaborating with Flipdish, Ireland’s online food ordering tech unicorn, with its integration systems.

“We’re not doing any direct ordering on the system at the moment so for the past while we’ve been redirecting consumers to the restaurants’ preferred ordering platforms,” said Mr O’Shea.

“We are building a direct ordering feature from Peckish that’s processed by Flipdish and we’re testing that with one of our restaurants this week here in Cork. We want to get that tied up before we launch in Dublin this summer,” he said.