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🚀 Startup Stories with Atlassian: How Tasteport Turned a Family Pain Point into a Scalable Platform

Adam Gilleland

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.

Are you a founder in the Atlassian for Startups program interested in being featured in our Startup Stories with Atlassian series? If so, please fill out this Google Form.

Are a founder interested in joining the Atlassian for Startups program? Learn more and apply here!

Comments

Aaqib Usmani

Thank you tremendously @Adam Gilleland

for the authentic care & quality you put into showcasing our story at Tasteport.

It has been a joy to work with you, Philip, Peggy & the entire Atlassian team so far, both in and out of the startups program.

Having been part of even MAG7 Startup Programs, I can attest once again you have been one of the most engaged and welcoming teams we've ever worked with it.

Can't wait to try out Rovo Remix & Dev with our engineers shortly, especially after your Claude collab release!

Have an amazing day you all

-- Aaqib

Philip Braddock

Thank YOU, @Aaqib Usmani , for allowing us to learn about Tasteport!!!

Adam Gilleland

We LOVE these conversations, @Aaqib Usmani!! Thank you for your time and for sharing your story 🚀

Sidiki Sanoh

Aaqib's story is the kind that doesn't get told enough.

He didn't start with a market opportunity slide. He started with a dining table in Richmond Hill and a frustration that millions of people share but nobody had properly solved. That's where the best companies come from, not from spotting a gap in a report but from living the problem long enough to understand every layer of it.

The 100 interviews before building anything is the detail that stands out. Most founders want to skip that part. Tasteport didn't. And you can see it in the product, they built infrastructure, not just an app, because the interviews told them where the real friction lived.

The inventory problem is also the one nobody talks about but it's what actually keeps specialty grocers off the internet. It's not that they don't want to sell online. It's that their entire internal language was built for people who already know what they're selling. Shorthand that works perfectly inside the store breaks completely the moment a customer or algorithm tries to interpret it.

What Tasteport built there isn't flashy but it's load-bearing. Clean catalog infrastructure is what makes everything else possible. Aaqib essentially had to build the missing layer before he could build the business.

The communities you're serving deserve this. Rooting for it.

Aaqib Usmani

🙏 Thank you for that beautiful reflection and the incredible praise you've shared our way @Sidiki Sanoh

I will be forwarding it over to our team so they can hear how eloquently you've put their efforts, and the appreciation you've shown.

As people who've lived in and loved these cultural communities for 20+ years, myself and our co-founders, founding team members, spouses, business partners, family members and investors truly hope we can make these international staples that are essential to not just our nutrition, but identities, accessible for all to enjoy.

And hopefully, we can help transcend not just borders, but language barriers too, by letting everyone get a taste of home and taste something new.

Will do our best to live up to this 💯

Aaqib Usmani

Thank you @Philip Braddock @Adam Gilleland both for this AND the incredible signed(!) Atlassian F1 Williams hat to commemorate our collaboration.

I didn't get to celebrate Christmas this year and open gifts, 🎁, so this felt like Christmas morning!

More than any material gift, I am grateful I've got to meet you both, people with such real authentic care and passion to delight those you're trying to empower in our startup community, this year in 2026 -- you both are the gifts that just keep giving. 🌟

Anwesha Pan

Thanks @Adam Gilleland for sharing this story!

Aaqib Usmani

Thank you for taking the time to read our story and learn about Tasteport's mission for our world @Anwesha Pan