Food Dude: Double deal with Maschmeyer and Wöhrl falls through – these are the reasons

Hamburg-based founder Sven Torner has two passions: cooking and branding . The former has been his hobby since he was a child, he explains in "Die Höhle der Löwen" (DHDL). He has pursued his second passion as a career for many years – most recently at his own agency for more than a decade. With Food Dude, he has now found a way to combine the two – and thus fully utilize his expertise.

The recipe app is designed to make cooking easier for its users. The highlight: recipes are read aloud – instruction by instruction and at the user's pace. This eliminates the need for users to scroll with dirty hands or repeatedly interrupt their cooking to read the instructions.

To demonstrate the functions, founder Torner invites lioness Dagmar Wöhrl on stage. She will later say that "something jumped" and by that she probably means that well-known spark. Only in a business sense. Wöhrl will certainly be enthusiastic - about the product, but above all about the founder, who presents his app confidently and has an answer to all of the lions' questions. At this moment, however, Dagmar Wöhrl is busy preparing a piece of tuna. The app gives the instructions step by step. This is where another highlight becomes apparent: voice control. Torner says "again" so that the app reads out the last instruction again. With the command "next", the app skips to the next instruction. This means that users actually always have their hands free.

While that might have been enough to convince a few lions, Torner goes even further. Although his app had only been available for download for a short time at the time of the DHDL recording, the founder had already managed to convince several prominent chefs to collaborate. Three of them – Lucki Maurer, Meta Hiltebrand, and Mike Süsser – even strolled onto the DHDL stage to support the show and patiently answered questions about the app – as if they had nothing else to do. Not only have they all contributed their own recipes to the app, but they also personally read them out loud in the app.

Given this prominent involvement, Tijen Onaran's question is obvious: Are the chefs also invested in Food Dude? No, is the answer. The chefs are paid per recipe. Users pay €4.99 per month for this. There's also a free-to-access section in the app. This is filled with recipes from collaborations with well-known brands like Barilla and Mövenpick, which in turn pay for the service. Founder Torner also set this up for the app's launch.