Foodie.fm

» see foodie.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Somebody in the British grocery trade press called it the Facebook for groceries, and the label stuck hard enough that it is still the first thing written about Foodie in 2026. The phrase was not wrong. Foodie.fm launched in 2009 as grocery shopping with a social layer bolted to it: you posted recommendations and followed other people, and what the service suggested back was shaped by what those people put in their baskets.

Underneath the social part sat a serious piece of engineering. Foodie connected to every store in a chain and then to your specific store, which meant it knew the live inventory and, in the Finnish deployments, the physical shelf position of the thing you were looking for. A shared list let a household plan and shop against one document. In January 2012 the Evening Standard filed the whole idea under social eatworking and named it a trend for the year.

The company behind it was Digital Foodie, later Digital Goodie, founded in 2009 by Kalle Koutajoki with Samuli Mattila, Lauri Arte and Arto Lukkarila. Koutajoki ran it as chief executive until 2019. The business turned out to be the platform rather than the consumer brand. Tesco signed up in the United Kingdom, Finland's S Group moved its online grocery store onto the technology, and Koutajoki was quoted afterward saying the co-op's online sales had risen fifteen percent.

~ the record ~

~ the nokia client ~

One line in the record dates this thing better than its launch year does. Foodie shipped a Facebook application, plus native clients for iPhone and Android and, tellingly, for Nokia. A Nokia build means Symbian, and 2009 is about the last moment a European consumer product had to take Symbian seriously, because Nokia still owned the phone in most pockets on the continent.

That was certainly true where I was. Nokia was the default handset in Turkey across the whole 2000s and stayed the default well past the point where the rest of the stack had moved on. What Turkey did not have in 2009 was a supermarket chain with live inventory on the web, so the layer Foodie was built to sit on top of did not exist here for another decade. Ordering food to the door did become ordinary in Turkey eventually, by a different route, and it did not come through the supermarket.

~ two domains ~

There is a naming problem in the record worth stating plainly. The Wikipedia article is filed at Foodie.fm, which was the startup's own address, but the thing switched off in June 2022 was foodie.fi, the Finnish build S Group ran. They are one service under two domains, which is why the article's own death sentence carries a different domain than its title does.

Both are gone now, in opposite directions. foodie.fm does not resolve at all. foodie.fi still answers and redirects into s-kaupat.fi, so the traffic still lands somewhere and the name is gone from the front of it. S Group kept the inventory integration and the shelf data and put a different word on top.

The engineering outlived the shutdown by design, which was always the deal Digital Foodie signed. Nobody ever wrote an announcement for the name.

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