Investment Spotlight: Zest, LA29

Zest teaches Gen-Z how to cook (and save money) with gamification. Think Duolingo for cooking.

Older generations learned culinary chops through cookbooks and TV shows, but Gen-Z prefers to upskill through online learning, especially mobile apps.

How Zest works:

1. Consumers download the mobile app and create an account.
2. They take an onboarding quiz to get placed into a skill level (1-6). (Note: adding this quiz to the onboarding process resulted in a 5x conversion percentage for the Zest team.)
3. After the quiz, consumers are served recipes that match their skill level.
4. Quizzes, chef tips, and video tutorials help subscribers earn badges and advance to higher skill levels.

After launching in 2022, Zest reached its first 1000 paying customers mostly organically. Their TikTok has 136K+ followers and 3.9M Likes. Zest has a 4.6 rating on the Apple store (533 ratings).

Co-founders Jake and Graham were best friends in college and resolved to create Zest after the fire department was called on Jake for destroying a Digiorno Pizza. (Graham, a skilled cook, was the perfect counterbalance.)

Shortly after they added two co-founders: Sav, a designer, and Amrit, who built the product.

We accepted the team into the 29th cohort of our accelerator, which began in August 2023.

If you’d like to have fun learning how to cook and save money, visit https://zestapp.co/ to get started.

And if you’re a builder-founder interested in working with us on fundraising and growth, please consider applying to the LAUNCH Accelerator!

We review applications on a rolling basis. Learn more and apply at http://launchaccelerator.co