Launch of Feed My Guests at the Sanctuary Cafe, in Hove. Specilaists in gluten free, vegan and vegetarian foods. Verbatim.

Hi. I’m Pete Jenkins. I just plan to say a few words about why I started Feed My Guests and what it is and then move on to the prize draw and let you all get on with enjoying yourselves.

First of all I’d like to say thank you to you all for coming here tonight to help me celebrate.

I came up with the idea for Feed My Guests over a year ago, I suspect I was in the pub at the time. We were talking about who out of our friends and family we were going to invite to dinner next. As we talked I realised two things. One was that we couldn’t remember what we’d fed our guests the last time they came round. We didn’t want to feed them the same meal again, or even possibly for the 3rd or 4th time.

The other was that it was going to be a real hassle to invite more than two of our friends at once. As they all have different foods they want or need to avoid. Amongst our friends and family we’ve got vegetarians, vegans, coeliacs, diabetics, nut allergies and dairy allergies. As well as these limiting choices, there are the specific foods people just don’t like. Such as coriander, celery, olives, goat’s cheese and cinnamon and many more that I just can’t remember.

Now, my beautiful fiancée Jacqui is pretty organised, as some of you may be, and she kept a little black book to list the foods we find out that people don’t like. Even so, this is difficult to keep up to date as people’s likes change over time.

Now, we did want to continue having friends round for dinner. So, my answer was to have a website where you could list all of the foods you don’t like or can’t eat. To make it easy for your friends & family to see this list. Thus making it easy for you to invite people to dinner or for you to be invited to dinner more. It’s not just for dinner parties; anything involving food should be made easier, planning what to eat at lunches, evening meals, kids’ parties, having friends over and so on.

The website would also hold a record of what you fed your guests each time they come over. So, the next time you can cook something new for them, not bore them with the same dishes again!

This website was going to be called yuck.com… that may have been due to the influence of the wine. Luckily that website name was already in use and we eventually named ours as Feed My Guests.

I worked on the specifics of this idea for a few months and then was encouraged by a friend to join Facebook. This made me realise that here was a website that already made it easy for friends to connect and communicate, that had over 7 million users in the UK and that had just opened up their service to allow developers to add functionality to what they’d already got. Well, it seemed a no-brainer to me that we could get our service up and running quicker if we started by adding something useful to Facebook.

We started actually building it a week before Christmas and by the beginning of February we had a prototype up, which some of you here helped us to test (for which many thanks). The testing enabled us to make it much more user friendly and useful and that’s why it’s now ready to be officially launched to the world tonight!

My hope is that it will enable more people to enjoy better social lives no matter what foods they may be allergic to, or what diets they may be on or what foods they are avoiding for moral reasons or even because they just plain dislike something. I like the idea that we can use the web to help people meet up in the physical world more too.


Now, generally when I talk about this, people say that “that sounds like a great idea but how do you make any money?”. Internet users tend to expect websites and services to be provided to them for free these days. So, that means we probably wouldn’t be successful if we charged a subscription. So the main way we aim to cover our costs and make some money is to show adverts on the site. We’re trying to get advertisers like specialist food manufacturers, retailers and restaurants so that even the adverts can be as relevant and useful as possible to our users.

We will never sell our users personal information, but once we have lots of users we should also have some interesting general information about allergies, intolerances, popular diets and so on. This information could well be of interest to food manufacturers and retailers to help them spot trends and develop their next products, so we hope they will support Feed My Guests too.

A quick word about our future plans for Feed My Guests. Over the next couple of months we plan to expand Feed My Guests so that our users can link to anybody they know, not just Facebook users, and show them what they can’t eat and invite them round for some food.

We also plan to add a recipes section, so that when you get up a list of all the ingredients you should avoid using you’ll be able to click a button and be offered a list of recipes that you can use which don’t have those ingredients in.

Please do send me any requests for new features, you’ll find my business card with contact details in your goody bag.

I do want to say thank you to all my sponsors for this evening’s event.
• Helen Pengelly of Johnson’s Dietary Provisions Ltd, provider of this fabulous Hamper of goodies.
• Duncan Innes of Sussex and the City, who has kindly provided our wine tasting this evening.
• Amanda Walling of Let Them Eat Cake, what a great looking cake.
• To Sandra of the Sanctuary Café for sponsoring this marvellous venue and the buffet food for us tonight.
• To Jon Silver from Southdown Studios for making us look good in tonight’s photographs. And
• To Ian Smith who has done all the design work, from the Feed My Guests logo, these excellent dinner invitations and the design on these t-shirts

Each of you should by now have a goody bag, inside, apart from some more goodies and useful information from our sponsors, is your raffle ticket. For the raffle, I’d like to ask each of our sponsors to step up here and draw a winning ticket out. We’ve got half a dozen limited edition t-shirts as worn by myself and modelled by my beautiful assistants, 2 Feed My Guests aprons to encourage you into the kitchen, this hamper and this fantastic cake.

First up, a t-shirt… then Ian (2 t’s), then Jon (2 t’s), then Sandra (2 t’s), then Duncan (2 aprons), then Amanda (cake) and Helen (Hamper).

Thank you again for coming. Please enjoy the rest of the food, buy some drinks from the bar now that we’ve exhausted Duncan’s wine selection and please tell your friends & family about Feed My Guests and invite someone to dinner!

Feed my guests: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7969959755