Tastemade Raises Another $10 Million And Launches An iPhone App For Video Reviews Of Local Restaurants
In just 12 months since being founded, Los Angeles-based Tastemade has carved out a place for itself as the go-to place for high-quality videos about food on Facebook.
Context & Ripple Effects
Tastemade is building on an audience for food video on Facebook by adding a dedicated iPhone destination for local restaurant reviews. Its move follows the earlier example of Viddy reaching the top of the free iPhone chart with Facebook Timeline distribution, underscoring how social reach can seed mobile-video products.
Facebook’s mobile Pages had also added OpenTable reservations, placing restaurant discovery, video and booking closer together on the same mobile surface. The $10 million raise gives Tastemade resources to pursue its own place in that discovery path.
First-order effects
- Tastemade gains capital to expand food-video production and an iPhone app that gives viewers a direct route to local restaurant reviews beyond Facebook.
- Restaurants featured by Tastemade gain a visual discovery channel, while Facebook retains a distribution role for the publisher’s existing food-video audience.
Second-order effects
- Facebook’s OpenTable-enabled mobile Pages and Tastemade’s review app create adjacent routes from restaurant content to consumer action, increasing the value of owning the mobile discovery experience.
- Food-video publishers seeking audiences on Facebook face a clearer incentive to turn social distribution into owned mobile products rather than rely solely on News Feed reach.
Third-order effects
- If publishers can convert social audiences into local discovery behavior, food media may compete less as entertainment alone and more as an intermediary between restaurants and diners.
- The combination of short-form video, mobile location and reservation integrations points toward restaurant discovery becoming a contested layer across social platforms, publishers and booking services.
The trend: Socially distributed video publishers are using mobile apps to turn audience attention into local commerce and discovery services.