The paths of Serkan Toso and Kaoro Joho first crossed when they found they were doing something similar with their food startups – Toso was running Tokyobyfood.com, a website to help foreign travellers find Japanese food while Joho was operating Tablecross, a restaurant reservations app.
Both had a charity element to their businesses – for every booking made on Tokyobyfood, it donated 10 meals to children in developing countries while Tablecross donated a meal for every booking.
Serkan Toso and Kaoro Johu: A meeting of like minds on a mission to build a leading food tourism platform for travellers to Japan.
The two decided to merge their business sometime in 2019 into Tablecross Co Ltd to create byFood.com, with a vision to building it into a leading food tourism platform for inbound travellers to Japan. That union has paid off – last week, it secured US$2.24m in Series A funding to expand its business in Japan; and it is also eyeing overseas markets such as Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand.
The investment was led by Shoku no Mirai No.1 Investment Limited Partnership as the lead investor; with JTB Corporation, Veltra Corporation, and PR TIMES Inc. as underwriters. With this investment, Tablecross has received a cumulative procurement amount of approximately US$4.1m.
“Our investors have good synergy with our business,” said Turkey-born Toso, who arrived in Japan eight years ago to pursue a master’s in business management.
The investment by Shoku no Mirai is led by Kemuri Ventures, which is active in the restaurants, ecommerce and food tech space. JTB is developing a total solution for inbound tourism and byFood.com is a good fit, which will allow its customers to better discover food experiences.
Veltra, Japan’s leading tours and activities platform, plans to connect byFood and Linktivity, which can be used by 180 transportation companies nationwide, to accelerate the activation of regional tourism, while PR Times will work on joint packages with byFood as well as run communications campaigns around food tourism.
“We wanted smart money to expand our business,” said Toso. “There is huge demand for food tourism – 70% of travellers come to Japan for the food – but the supply is not so strong. We want to increase the number of restaurants that can be reserved in Japan and to create food experiences.”
He estimated that of the 850,000 restaurants in Japan, only 40,000 were accepting online reservations. “Everything is so manual. Some restaurants are still using fax machines.”
He added, “We will use the funds to invest in systems integration through API as well as invest in recruitment and marketing. We are also preparing for global expansion, starting with Asia – we don’t want to be only in Japan. We want to go to markets where there is a language barrier and where the food culture is strong.”
Korea, Taiwan and Thailand are possibilities for expansion, he said.
Toso, who started Tokyobyfood in 2019, has learnt the hard way that when it comes to starting a business you have to be prepared for the unexpected. “After operating for six months, Covid happened and Japan’s borders were closed for 2.5 years and only opened in October 2022. We learnt a lot during that time,” he smiled.
And it managed to stay profitable through the pandemic years. “Even though we had no customers through the website, we did many consultancy projects. We created experiences with the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan, with whom we signed a five-year partnership. We did video production and created lots of content. And we worked with local restaurants to help them build websites.
“Now we do both businesses – platform and consultancy. It is good for us, we created another revenue stream and it makes us stronger.”
It has a fulltime team of 15. Toso acknowledges that the biggest challenge to scaling a business like byfood is the language barrier. “There are so many creative ideas for food experiences but everyday we come across the same issue, in that village, there’s no one who can do it in English.”
Toso started his food website to address his own pain point. “As a foreigner living in Japan, it is challenging to go to restaurants. There’s the language barrier and there’s no reservation system,” he said. “I also wanted to contribute to society.”
Hence his donation of 10 meals for every booking. “In running the business for a few months, I came across my partner, Kaoru, who was doing something similar and so we decided to merge our business to grow and cover the whole of Japan.”
Today Tablecross donates 10 school lunches per reservation/order to children in developing countries and since its establishment, byFood has donated approximately 380,000 school lunches.
