Below is the remarkable entrepreneurial story of a colleague of mine, worth sharing…
Ahmed Shereba, founder of LETTUCEAT
The Lettuceat story, as told by A. Shereba himself …
“ The idea resonated 2 years ago. My father always had a passion for cooking various foods and cuisines, and we always had people over for dinner gatherings. He usually served a 5 course meal: a starter, a salad, a small dish, a main dish and a dessert.
What’s insightful about this is that his salads always left a mark! They were so good that actually a lot of the people always said “We truly love the salad. If it’s not offensive, I would love to take another serving“; or “ This is my perfect meal, I could live on this every day!”
Even though the rest of his food was phenomenal, Egyptian consumers are just not used to eating tasty delicious salads as meals…this is how it all really started! And so, I went to my father. Leveraging my innovation marketing background and experience with launching new brands in Egypt, I told him it was time to capture this opportunity and offer something unique and distinctive to the Egyptian consumer. It was time to re-position the salad perception in Egypt!
Let’s introduce salads as meals, ‘fresh, delish dishes ‘as we say at Lettuceat. That’s when we kicked off the idea of menu engineering, which was the building block of the project. We wanted to get everything right, especially when it comes to maintaining the quality of the dish: every salad one gets has to taste great EVERY time … everything gets weighted, chopped exactly in perfect dimensions and sizes, time and again. We engineered the ‘formula card’ for each dish so that it would be really be perfect every time and it would be just a matter of assembly, with only the dressing kept as the x-factor ingredient that only us –the owners– know (secretly made away from the staff). After the menu engineering was finalized, I wanted to have the right structure and team for this company to get started. Our vision: become a serious competitive brand in the Egyptian market.
At that time my very dear friend and running partner, Walid Hamdy, was thrilled and saw the opportunity. He shared our vision and belief that we could turn things around. And with his experience as a great entrepreneur, we brought it to life.
Finally, my sister Hadir Shereba was already working as an account manager on some of the food restaurants for a below-the-line agency, so she had some experience in the execution part of restaurants. She was an integral part of connecting with the right stakeholders, from Interior designers for the restaurant, to menu design , packaging materials etc…. she handled it all. With the right building blocks in place and a well synergized team, we set up a company called “Creative Foods ” which would be the hub for innovative restaurants concepts such as Lettuceat, our first restaurant concept, launched this year.
As a starting point in our positioning strategy, we all agreed on one thing and one thing only and that is: we are not here to make salads nor to just offer the Egyptian consumer a great fresh product; we will sell them a whole new salad experience: the right way of eating a perfect salad. Any competitor can make a salad, but the experience would be the hardest thing to imitate. We knew that this business would be mostly based on delivery service; 80% of orders are delivery based. We target the “at work” occasion, which really also contributes to 75% of our sales so far.
And with that in mind, we went into serious details when it came to the whole salad pack experience:
1- For starters, the salad bowl. We had to import the salad bowl from Taiwan because we wanted to offer a salad bowl that would carry enough volume to position this salad as a meal. More importantly , the rounded bowl would allow you to easily dress the salad and toss the dressing around in the bowl without spilling the vegetables outside , cause currently in Egypt ALL restaurants that offer salads serve them in a very small squared bowl that you would just hate tossing your salad in cause it will all spill out. So this was actually KEY.
2- The product: our salads are full meal salads, so it’s not your typical lettuce with a slice of chicken that makes you wonder where is my food? ( like all competition do) You would get a whole 150 grams of chicken or 150 grams of smoked duck with nuts, cheese, the whole nine yards that would make you feel like WOW this is seriously a full MEAL! From a product perspective, we also wanted to ensure our consumers get the freshest, most delicious and highest quality of salads they can get. All our vegetables ingredients are freshly sourced on daily bases from local suppliers and go through an enormous cleaning and cleansing process. Our ingredients such as smoked duck or shrimps, are sourced from the best qualified ISO certified manufacturers. We also went a step further; ALL our ingredients are washed with RO Water, Reverse Osmosis water. We have invested in machinery to be able to get this bacteria free water unlike regular tape water that is not perfectly clean as we all know. Most importantly we wanted to be the most delicious salad you will ever have, we always had problem eating salads anywhere in Egypt as their dressings are dull and boring, and this is where our secret “Know How” makes us unique! I can proudly say that we have signatures dressings that are unique to us and our consumers have quickly noticed that.
3- As we call it, is ‘the magic bread pill’. All our salads are served with 70 gram of our signature-own-baked-multigrain-bread. This is key for the positioning, which also none of our competitors do. This piece of bread helps in positioning the salad as a meal because Egyptians love bread and it help curb their appetite and bread is part of the everyday meal.
4- The quantity: all restaurants in Egypt don’t serve you salad in a quantity that would satisfy an average Egyptian appetite. We wanted to make sure that when you’re eating our salad, you are getting more than what it’s worth. When it comes to size, I can claim that easily we are double any normal salad quantity served in any of the top restaurants in Egypt.
5- Pricing: the most important factor to us, the average salad price in Egypt would be between 30 to 35 pounds, with our biggest competitors averaging around 40 to 45, we went above that as well with an average price of salad as 50 LE. The rationale behind it was three things…
A- we want to be premium to competition: we offer consumer double the serving size and offer a quality that is top notch in terms of pack / product / experience
B- An average meal [and remember, we are positioning ourselves as a meal with our salads] would cost around 60 + LE if you are dinning out. Hence -although we are be the most expensive salad in the market, we would still be a convenient affordable “meal”
6- Exciting: salads in Egypt are known to be dull and boring, anyone who would be eating a salad would be asked “why are you on a diet?”…… We don’t really cater to a certain diet; this is actually something that we are trying to change about the perception for salads. Most people see salads as diet food, something boring and tasteless, which we are definitely NOT. That’s why we have all sort of exciting salads that could cater to any food philosophy. What we really want to reach is for Egyptian consumers to get into the mentality of eating right and not dieting. Diets are pre historic; eating deliciously right is our ultimate goal. This was part of the brief for the artwork and our brand identity; we wanted to have a fresh, exciting clean look.
7- Finally, the store: we opened in Zamalek, an upscale area of Cairo. The reason is that if you make it big with Zamalek consumers, you make it big with Cairo – they are the trend setters. Zamalek is affluent and it is the prime spot of Cairo for night outs and restaurants. We wanted to stand out with a cool looking small design store that would be the hub for all our fresh salads. The interior was carefully designed to reflect freshness and comfortable to sit in, we introduced the communal dinning table sittings which is not common in Egypt, but this is also intention from day one, as we wanted to create a unique friendly fun atmosphere, so random walk in customers would come in and sit and enjoy a meal together which is not very common in Egypt but it’s also part of our unique mix. In a nut shell as we say “Lettuceat” is truly your fresh, delish dish.”
A remarkable story! It made even it to the newspapers in Egypt : http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/04/11/lettuceat-perfects-salads/
I’m a fan!
Here’s my two sense on it: FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS! With passion, a good idea and the right people around you, you can do almost anything. Clearly, Ahmed is going for it, pulling this off on top of a full-time job. Kudos! Kurt
