ResQ Club acquires competitor, attracts funding from German investors and appoints the new CEO

Competitor acquisition, funding from German investors and new CEO – lots of news from ResQ Club this week.

Finnish food rescuing company ResQ Club have decided to join forces with German competitor MealSaver in fighting food waste. Both companies have developed “food rescuing services” that allow users to buy quality surplus food from restaurants and other food service-providing venues at a discount. Their service models are complementary, and the new merged ResQ team aims to develop both approaches further together with their food provider partners. The aim is to be able to reduced unnecessary waste of quality food in as many fields as possible.

For that matter, the newly established company has attracted additional financing from among others Munich based Ananda Social Venture Fund and Berlin Atlantic Food Labs (Berlin). Helsinki-based Cleantech Invest participated in the funding round announced that it increases its ownership from 8.7% to 9.5% after the investment round and after the acquisition. Alexander Lidgren, CEO Cleantech Invest and board member ResQ Club comments:

“ResQ Club has grown very impressively since our initial investment a year ago. Restaurant waste in Germany alone represents a multi billion euro market. This market is now the next step for ResQ. Mealsaver are already present in Germany, know it well and have a supplier and user base to start from. We are excited to see this merged company perform and especially excited to welcome the new owners into the company. We know they will add a lot of value in the growth journey ahead. ”

In addition to that, earlier this week former CEO of ResQ Club, Tuure Parkkinen made an announcement on his Facebook page about the new person taking over the role of the CEO of the company.

The role of a startup CEO tends to expand, and easily grows beyond one’s capacity. Finding the right growth manager (to delegate things to) is not an easy task either. However, thinking outside the box, we realised we instead had an awesome CEO candidate right in front of our noses: Oula Antere!

ResQ Club was founded in 2015 and within only 2 years the service has got over 120,000 registered users and more than 200,000 portions have already been “ResQ’d”. The number of affiliated restaurants, cafés, hotels, and other food service providers is now at about 1000. The company operates in Finland, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Estonia, and will continue to expand even further.