Great British Chefs, the fastest growing food website in the UK, secures £1.5 million funding
Great British Chefs, the fastest growing food website in the UK, secures £1.5 million funding. Find out more in our founder's announcement.
Great British Chefs, the fastest growing food website in the UK, secures £1.5 million funding
Great British Chefs, the fastest growing food website in the UK, secures £1.5 million funding. Find out more in our founder's announcement.
I am delighted to announce that we have raised £1.5 million in funding from Bestport Ventures LLP, reinvestment from current shareholders, a number of high-net-worth individuals and the Board and Management team. This funding round will enable us to accelerate the expansion of the business in a number of ways that will be exciting to our community of food lovers, the chefs and bloggers that we work with and the brands that advertise across our platforms.
Over the last four years we have grown very rapidly and our website now delivers over 2 million page impressions a month to a community of 1 million food lovers. We have created a number of dynamic platforms including Facebook (142,000), Pinterest (314,000), Twitter (48,000) and Google+ (392,000) that many regard as best in class. We have built a database of over 125,000 people who are highly engaged - our regular newsletters get great open rates and our competitions often get over 20,000 entries.
We have some ambitious plans for the business in the years ahead and these are focused around expanding the depth and quality of our content and on delivering it to our community in the best ways possible. We are expanding the number of chefs and recipes featured on Great British Chefs without compromising on the quality that we have become known for. We are rapidly growing our “How to Cook” section of the site and are looking to add more specialist content that no other publisher has provided. We are also looking to create more editorial on the site, as we feel that this is an area that we haven’t been able to invest enough in over the last 4 years. To deliver all of this, we have significantly expanded our content team and have been recruiting pretty aggressively over the last 2 months.
We are also due to relaunch our website this Summer. While the amount of content on our site has expanded rapidly over the last three years, we haven’t been able to evolve the site at the same pace. For the last 6 months we have been quietly working away on a total rebuild of the site from the ground up. Our ambition is to create the most beautiful food website in the world and we are going to make sure our amazing images are front and centre. We have created a new CMS (Content Management System) that will speed up the delivery of the content and will allow us to move to a responsive platform, a far better solution for those visiting via mobile, and create ad formats that are more seamlessly integrated into our content.
Since we created the business, we have always planned to go beyond Great British Chefs and launch into other culinary markets. In 2014, in partnership with Mr & Mrs Smith, we launched Great Global Chefs and proved that we can extend our brand story into other markets. We own over 100 URLs that follow the same logic as Great British Chefs (Great + culinary style / nationality + chefs) and are planning on launching a number over the coming 12 months. It is likely that Great Italian Chefs will be the next to market, but watch this space.
We are always keen to hear from the people we work with, so if you have any ideas or thoughts on things we should be doing, we would be delighted to hear from you. Just drop us an email at any time or pop into our office for a coffee.
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