Tastemade takes $25M & promises to fill your feed with food videos in return

Foodies who prefer Android, prepare to rejoice: Tastemade, the massive food media network, will soon give you the means to consume user generated food videos while you consume your next locally sourced, sustainably farmed meal.

Launching later this month as a Samsung-exclusive for the first 90 days, the Tastemade Android app will bring the same features to the Android camp that iOS users have been enjoying for almost a year now. You can find and watch videos created by other food-obsessed users, locate places to eat near you and of course, create your very own one-minute food videos using the app’s built-in video production features.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1498489,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,entrepreneur,","session":"D"}']

It’s the next logical step for a company that, in 2012 set out to “connect the world through food,” according to its co-founder, Larry Fitzgibbon, who spoke with VentureBeat earlier this week. His company just announced a massive $25 million funding round today.

Having already become a force to be reckoned with in the original content space — Tastemade maintains a 7,000 square foot production studio in California — and a dominant presence on YouTube with a curated network of over 100 food-based channels, the mobile space represents the third leg of Tastemade’s strategy for world food media dominance.

“With the Tastemade app, we empower anyone to have their own show,” says Fitzgibbon. Noting that the inspiration for the app came from the founders’ own desire to share their favorite food experiences with friends, Fitzgibbon points out that, “All of us have experienced being a tastemaker […] depending which cities you’ve been to, you’re friends might ask you, ‘Where’s the best place to go?’”

The Tastemade app lets everyone from the most casual diner to the most passionate foodie answer that question via video clips since, as Fitzgibbon says, “That’s the most impactful way to communicate.”

There’s certainly plenty of precedent for Tastemade’s approach. Instagram, the hugely popular app that was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for the then-astonishing price of $1 billion, has hundreds of millions of active users. The most popular type of content they share? Yup, it’s food. But if you’re serious about food, having your friends fill up your feed with random shots of edibles is just a tease. What you really want is a dedicated place to ahem, feed your passion, and Tastemade delivers just that.

Fitzgibbon was a bit coy on exactly how many one-minute videos Tastemade app users had created thus far but he confirmed that the app itself had been downloaded “hundreds of thousands of times.”

Beyond the goal of creating and growing a global community around food content, the app has a little known, but intriguing element: If you have a particular talent for creating dazzling food videos, you might just find yourself with an offer from Tastemade. “The app has been a great place for us to discover really smart talent. There have been people who we’ve discovered through the app who we have worked with in other projects that we’ve done.”

So get ready for your close-up food fans… you may not have trained with the great chefs of Europe, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be the next Anthony Bourdain. All you need is a passion for food — and the Tastemade app, of course.

[aditude-amp id="medium1" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1498489,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,entrepreneur,","session":"D"}']