Castiron serves up a $6M seed round to support ‘food artisans’ – TechCrunch — techcrunch.com

The pandemic hasn’t been easy for anyone, but the food service industry has been hit particularly hard. More than 90,000 restaurants and bars have closed, leaving workers unemployed in an already precarious industry. And those who kept their jobs faced the stressful demands of customer-facing work in a pandemic. In response to the changed industry landscape, food service veterans are launching their own businesses, whether they’re delivering take-out meals in their neighborhood or mailing cans of kombucha around the country. “People tell them that they make great cakes, or that their sourdough is better than everybody else’s, or their hot sauce is amazing,” explained Castiron founder and CEO Mark Josephson. “And they dream of selling and building a business, but they end up spending 75% of their time on things other than what they’re good at.” He’s talking about everything that isn’t cooking: building a website, keeping track of finances and other administrative tasks.

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