visuEats secures US$150k investment for expansion
Published:Thursday | January 16, 2025 | 12:07 AMAinsworth Morris/Staff Reporter
Two weeks into the new year, Entrepreneur Sophronia McKenzie has reason to celebrate after securing a US$150,000 investment into her mobile restaurant app, visuEats.
The new investor is Mark Law, a pharmacist and chief executive officer of New Vision Distributors.
“After meeting our investor, one of the things that he saw was our technology, and [he] saw the goal in the technology. As such, we were able to secure [a] US$150,000 investment for us to [do more] market penetration, marketing, additional product development, and expansion in another Caribbean territory this year, 2025,” McKenzie told Food.
VisuEats is a mobile marketplace for restaurants, with both Android and iOS apps. Already, more than 50 Jamaican restaurants are already participants, with their menu options fully uploaded with photographs, such as Chez Maria, Macau, Uncorked, V.O.D.A Lounge, Julie Mango Restaurant and Cafe Hibiscus.
“Our goal is to make visuEats a household name in Jamaica. Not just for delivery, but for [all its] features and functionality: the visual menu [and] the reservations. Once you think gastronomy, [we want] you to think visuEats, and we will be putting Jamaica’s gastronomy on the map,” she said.
When asked how she convinced Law to buy into the business idea, McKenzie, who is a technology lover by nature, said it was him who “solicited their services to build a custom website leveraging our technology using our e-commerce within his platform in the website we built for him”.
“Because of that, he got a better understanding and appreciation for what we built,” she said.
The concept of visuEats came about in June 2018 during a happy hour conversation between McKenzie and a friend at the time in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. After getting the paper booklet menu at that restaurant, she thought of having an app [with] menu options with restaurants that could be viewed like graphics she would see on Instagram, so the woman with an associate’s degree in computer science got to work in making her own app.
“I wanted the same experience I saw on Instagram [where I saw food] and immediately wanted to eat it... I wanted to see pictures of the menu [on an app]... so that’s where the idea of visuEats was born, where initially it was just a visual menu where you are able to see pictures of the menu items, but after talking to the restaurants and the users, the restaurants wanted more features like reservations, online ordering for pick up and delivery, point of sales integration, etc, so that’s how we morphed and built out our technology,” McKenzie, who now resides in Florida told Food.
Once downloaded, users can view participating restaurants’ menus, book reservations, and order online for pick up and delivery.
More than 217,000 users have accessed the platform since it was launched in March 2023 in Jamaica.
McKenzie, who is a graduate of Wolmer’s Girls School and Vector Technology Institute, said she resigned from two full-time and remote software project management jobs to focus on the venture full-time.
“I was at a point where I was experiencing extreme burnout, and I had to make a decision regardless of where visuEats was financially, I’ve had to step out on faith like I’ve had to do all my life, and made the decision to become a full-time CEO,” McKenzie, who also went to the University of Technology (UTech) for two years and then transferred to Florida International University for accounting, said.