MyCater

Executive Summary

MyCater is working because of a vacated-market arbitrage, not a product invention. In April 2020 the category-defining marketplace for French corporate catering, GoCater (owned by US unicorn ezCater since 2018), shut its France operation to retrench to the US. That left a two-sided market with trained demand (office managers who had learned to order catering online) and stranded supply (event caterers who had just lost their revenue) and no platform connecting them. A team that already operated an online reception-catering business redeployed its existing technology and relaunched the category as MyCater in November 2020, seven months after the incumbent exited. The wedge is procurement compression: a buyer references one vendor, orders from 100+ vetted caterers, and receives one consolidated monthly invoice. Five and a half years later, local TrustMRR payment data shows roughly $2.24M in cumulative gross charge volume, a $499 average charge, and a record 2025 at $608K in gross charges. That is a durable lifestyle-scale marketplace, not a venture rocket, and the mechanism that built it is one of the most copyable patterns in this catalog: watch for incumbent retreats, then re-enter with pre-built supply relationships and a repositioned offer.

The core lever was timing plus asset reuse: the team did not build a marketplace from zero, it pointed an existing catering stack at a market that had just been abandoned.