Collapsed Providoor re-emerges, bringing celeb chef meals to your home
Providoor, an online marketplace for high-end restaurants that collapsed in April, will return in a new incarnation as a celebrity chef meal home-delivery business after a serial entrepreneur bought the assets off administrators.
The brand will re-emerge on Monday after Sam Benjamin, who runs Sydney-based Seventh Street Ventures, scooped up the concept’s name and customer roster. His interests include the music publisher Rolling Stone in Australia, Brag Media, and online gourmet food takeaway Kaspa.
Entrepreneur Sam Benjamin has bought the name and assets of failed start-up Providoor, and is relaunching it as a home delivery food business this week. Louie Douvis
Providoor was co-founded by celebrity chef Shane Delia, and promoted as a saviour of the restaurant industry during COVID-19 lockdowns by allowing customers to order deliveries from the menus of their favourite kitchens.
However, its rapid growth ground to a halt after Australia returned to normality. It was cast, like grocery delivery start-up Milkrun, as a victim of a tighter tech funding market.
Rather than operating in the same way as early Providoor, Mr Benjamin has signed up well-known chefs to create signature dishes that will be prepared by Providoor’s own kitchens.
The meals will then be delivered either ready-to-eat via Uber Eats under a Providoor Local brand, or with minimal preparation required via Providoor Frozen.
Participating chefs include Matt Preston, Silvia Colloca, Anna Polyviou, Luke Nguyen, Gary Mehigan, Manu Feildel, Justin Narayan and George Calombaris. The company will also start offering meals from well-known restaurants – also prepared in its own kitchens – shortly after launch.
Justin Narayan, Anna Polyviou, Manu Feildel, Matt Preston, George Calombaris, Silvia Colloca and Gary Mehigan are among the chefs who have signed on to have their meals prepared and delivered by Providoor.
“We want to create as close to a fine dining experience as you can at home,” Mr Benjamin said. “It is going to be delivered within 30 minutes and we want to make sure that it tastes the same and right every time. We are unique, we have got the exclusive rights to these chefs, you can read their cookbooks, but this is the time you get to taste their food.”
Mr Benjamin declined to say how much he paid for Providoor, but a report from its administrators, RSM, shows the deal was struck at $250,000.
In the same way that Woolworths acquired the Milkrun brand, website and social media assets after its collapse, the sale of Providoor is mainly about the brand and goodwill.
Mr Benjamin bought the business name, all Australian and internationally registered trademarks of the name “Providoor”, its customer database, domain names, software codebase and social media accounts.
Trial run
The entrepreneur said he had been preparing for more than a year for the new business. He used Kaspa to learn the ropes of the food and delivery business, without having a well-known brand to risk with any operational mistakes.
This preparation included riding along with one of his employees, who signed on as a Menulog driver, to understand food delivery.
“I wanted to learn everything about hospitality, and how you actually give great customer service,” he said. “So we got three kitchens, put on 35 people and off you go.”
The sale of Providoor did not include the transfer of liabilities, such as unclaimed vouchers worth $4.2 million, according to RSM’s report.
The old Providoor achieved net operating profits in the 2021 and 2022 financial years, but began accruing month-on-month losses from around June 2022.
The RSM report said that, as part of the sale of Providoor, it received 21 expressions of interest and eight non-binding indicative offers.
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