Online food exchange collapses

UK online food exchange Efdex announced the liquidation of its business Monday, joining the increasingly long list of dotcom casualties. The site launched in January 2000 as an e-market for the food and drink industry.

Efdex ran out of money in its third round of funding, and was unable to raise the additional $100m it needed to keep going. Kroll Buchler Phillips, the London insolvency practitioner is handling the case and confirmed Thursday that the whole company which is funded by an American investment group has gone into liquidation.

"The market had fallen away," said Lee Manning, partner at Kroll Buchler Phillips. "The company's assets are now negligible; everything had gone into the running of the site, that was never fully up and running."

All of Efdex' 200 staff were laid off Tuesday.

Efdex is one of the first business-to-business Web site to go under. Recent high profile dotcom collapses have included the B2C sites URwired, boo.com and Clickmango.