Engagement — Add-on Due Diligence
Code & Co. provides AI & Tech Due Diligence to Quality Guard, a Gimv portfolio company, ahead of its acquisition of Kooklin, a leading French provider of digital solutions for food safety and HACCP management.
Quality Guard has announced the acquisition of French software company Kooklin, a leading provider of digital solutions for food safety and HACCP management. With this acquisition, Quality Guard accelerates its international growth strategy and reinforces its position as one of Europe's leading players in the food safety sector.
Scope of work
Code & Co. advised Quality Guard on AI & Tech Due Diligence through an in-depth evaluation of the Kooklin platform, covering its food safety and HACCP management solution, AI-enabled product identification and labeling capabilities, and approach to customer operations across the French and Swiss foodservice market.
The assessment further examined the underlying software architecture, infrastructure, scalability, and cybersecurity practices, and concluded with a review of Kooklin's engineering organization, software development lifecycle, and key considerations for supporting continued product development and integration into the broader Quality Guard platform.
About Kooklin
Kooklin replaces paper with an HACCP tablet application that simplifies and automates HACCP management, enabling foodservice operators to manage traceability easily and stay compliant effortlessly. Kooklin integrates modern technologies to make HACCP compliance simpler and faster: from a photo of a label, AI automatically recognizes the product name, expiry date, allergens, supplier, and lot number. Headquartered in Mazamet, France, Kooklin is already used by more than 2,000 restaurants, artisans, supermarkets, and institutions. To learn more, visit https://www.kooklin.fr.
About Quality Guard
Quality Guard is a leading European food safety compliance platform serving the foodservice industry. Founded and led by Wim and Achile Van Gierdegom, the company has built a leading platform powered by a proprietary database of validated nutritional and allergen data, integrating with IoT-enabled hardware and offering full-service compliance support that gives foodservice professionals confidence that regulatory requirements are handled reliably and efficiently. Headquartered in Roeselare, Belgium, Quality Guard serves more than 9,000 customers across Europe. For more information, visit https://qualityguard.com.
About Gimv
Gimv forms fruitful partnerships with ambitious entrepreneurs and management teams focused on sustainable growth and value creation. With over 40 years of experience in building leading companies, Gimv operates four strategic investment platforms: Consumer, Healthcare, Smart Industries, and Sustainable Cities. Gimv invests directly in companies, mainly with the equity on its balance sheet, acting flexibly as an evergreen partner across buyout, growth, and venture capital structures, through both majority and minority holdings. Further information at https://www.gimv.com.