Hey Startups Community! Adam here from the Atlassian for Startups team 👋
In our latest episode of Startup Stories with Atlassian, I sat down with Aaqib Usmani, Founder & CEO of Tasteport, to talk about a problem that’s both deeply personal and surprisingly under‑served: getting truly authentic ethnic groceries, reliably, without spending your entire weekend driving between specialty stores.
The Tasteport Mission
Tasteport started at Aaqib’s dining table in Toronto, Richmond Hill to be exact. With roots in India and Tanzania and family spread across Dar es Salaam, Mumbai, London, the US, and Canada, food has always been the way his family stays connected to culture.
But that came with a cost. Everyone he talked to was running the same exhausting routine: a mainstream shop plus multiple trips to ethnic grocers just to get staples they couldn’t find elsewhere. Early online options weren’t much better – orders arrived late, wrong, or missing key items because staff didn’t recognize the products or language.
That frustration turned into action. After more than 100 interviews with friends, family, and community members, Aaqib and his co‑founders set out to fix it. Today, Tasteport partners with multicultural and specialty grocers to deliver tens of thousands of SKUs across 15 cities in the Greater Toronto Area, serving South Asian, Middle Eastern, and other niche communities. Their bigger vision is to power the multicultural infrastructure behind a $280B specialty and independent grocery market across North America.
From Idea to Infrastructure
What’s unique about Tasteport is how quickly they jumped from “app idea” to “infrastructure company.” Instead of launching a simple storefront, they built multiple connected platforms: one for ingesting and organizing grocers’ messy inventory sheets, one to guide in‑store bagging and order prep, one for driver logistics, and a modern customer shopping portal on top of it all.
Everyone on the founding team came from startup and tech backgrounds, including marketplace and e‑commerce companies, so they knew that solving this right meant going beyond a single interface. For their grocer partners, Tasteport effectively behaves like an outsourced e‑commerce department.
AI Where It Actually Matters
Long before generative AI went mainstream, Tasteport was using AI to solve one of the most painful operational problems grocers face: turning internal spreadsheets into a clean, shoppable online catalog.
Most store inventory files are written for “grocer eyes only” – cryptic names, inconsistent categories, shorthand that makes sense to staff but not to customers. Manually re‑categorizing thousands of products can eat up weeks of a manager’s time.
Tasteport worked with grocers and baggers to log and label thousands of items, then trained models that learn how real stores group products. Now, when a new grocer joins, they can hand over a simple text or Excel file and Tasteport’s AI organizes thousands of SKUs into customer‑friendly categories in minutes. That’s the quiet kind of AI that unlocks e‑commerce for businesses that have historically been left behind.
And when it comes to Atlassian, Aaqib is excited about what’s next.
"With Claude x Atlassian’s recently announced Managed Agents Partnership, our engineers excited about AI Agent / MCP capabilities now coming out already have Confluence automations, Rovo Remix and Dev on our Jira Backlog. We’re excited after our 2nd venture funding round to go all in with the Atlassian suite – a partner embracing the agentic future."
Why Atlassian (and Atlassian for Startups) Fit So Well
To coordinate five platforms, a distributed team, and operational complexity that touches real‑world logistics, Tasteport needed tools that wouldn’t fall over as they scaled. Aaqib and his co‑founders had used Jira extensively at previous companies, so choosing Atlassian felt natural and the Atlassian for Startups program helped them go all‑in early.
Jira now sits at the center of their product and engineering workflows. It gives them a single place to manage work across all platforms, and the mobile app lets Aaqib capture and prioritize ideas from anywhere. As they hire new engineers and contractors, they can plug them straight into existing boards and workflows without reinventing how they collaborate.
Confluence plays a growing role as they formalize global SOPs – documenting product requirements, logistics processes, and onboarding material so institutional knowledge doesn’t live only in the founders’ heads.
Looking ahead, Aaqib’s goal is to move from doing everything himself to enabling his team. That’s where Atlassian’s automation and agentic capabilities, including Rovo, are on their roadmap: encoding best practices into workflows, reducing repetitive coordination work, and helping new teammates ramp up faster as they expand beyond Toronto.
A Note for Founders
If you’re building in a “messy,” operationally heavy space – logistics, marketplaces, infrastructure for underserved communities – Tasteport’s story is a reminder that your internal tools are part of your product. The way you manage work, capture knowledge, and coordinate teams will either accelerate or slow down everything you’re trying to build.
Tasteport chose to build their multicultural grocery infrastructure on top of enterprise‑grade collaboration from day one, made accessible through the Atlassian for Startups program. That foundation lets them focus their energy where it matters most: helping millions of people access the foods that feel like home.
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