Startups

This former Monzo exec aims to take the pain out of weekly grocery shopping with his new startup Lollipop. Check out the 14-slide pitch deck it used to raise $6.1 million.

Fintech founder and former Monzo COO Tom Foster-Carter has turned his eye to groceries.
His new startup Lollipop wants to make the weekly shop much easier for busy families.
Check out the 14-slide pitch deck the startup used to raise $6.1 million from Octopus Ventures.

A serial entrepreneur and former Monzo chief operating officer has turned his attention away from fintech to grocery shopping.

Tom Foster-Carter, who also cofounded debit and credit card aggregator Curve and children’s finance app Osper, is set on transforming the weekly shop. His latest venture Lollipop, founded in 2020, just landed £5 million ($6.1 million) to help families get fed without the stress of planning meals and shopping for groceries.

The seed round was led by Octopus Ventures and builds on a £1 million ($1.2 million) pre-seed round from Maki VC, a backer of Olympian Jessica Ennis-Hill’s femtech startup Jennis.

The cofounder had the idea when his first child arrived during the busiest week of his career.

“I remember seeing these two – a huge work milestone and this huge personal milestone – colliding and I couldn’t do anything about either of them,” Foster-Carter told Insider. “I knew it was gonna throw our lives into chaos and it absolutely did.”

Doing the weekly shop nearly tipped the new parents “over the edge,” and Foster-Carter knew there had to be a software solution.

London-based Lollipop crunches user data – such as dietary requirements, number of people in the family, and their ages, budget, and lifestyle goals – and offers up recipes from its own in-house chefs or from BBC Good Food to create a meal plan. Users can also add their own recipes manually, and the platform will soon be able to pull information from website links.

Lollipop claims rapid delivery apps, which focus on last-minute orders, miss 90% of the grocery market that centers on stocking up the shelves.

Once recipes are selected, Lollipop syncs up with British supermarket Sainsbury’s and builds a shopping basket with automatically-selected ingredients that can be swapped out for alternatives if needed. In the future, users will be able to customize the types of ingredients they prefer. For example, the platform could always opt for the organic, gluten-free, or “lazy option,” such as pre-chopped ginger or garlic.

The company expects to add different supermarkets as it scales.

The system also has a sense of what ingredients that users commonly have in, Foster-Carter said, so some items like salt and pepper are automatically deselected from the basket until a user wants to top up their supplies. The platform also has a community element as users often share meal photos and advice, the cofounder added.

Lollipop, which claims to have thousands of people signing up every week, also allows users to order household essentials such as toilet paper. The company’s target audience is busy families like Foster-Carter’s own.

The fresh cash will be used to build out the platform, come out of beta, and double the company’s 20-person strong team by the end of the year.

Long term, Foster-Carter sees Lollipop connecting to smart devices so it knows exactly what is in a user’s fridge and cupboards and when it goes out of date. The cofounder said this will help tackle food waste and hopes to facilitate food sharing amongst neighbours.

Check out the 14-slide pitch deck Foster-Carter used to raise the fresh round.

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