Ahmed Khaled’s passion for tasty and unique food drove him to share his long experience in connecting with the best food providers with everyone. Last year, Khaled together with his two founders, Mohamed Mosaad and Alaa Abdel Moneim, decided to launch SPOON, a platform tailored for catering services online orderings, event creations and dine-in reservations. We are providing home-made/catering vendors with online tools by digitising their menus and ordering.
EG: Why did you start and what’s the passion behind it?
Ahmed Khaled: I’m so passionate about food. I’m always searching for places that make different kinds of food apart from the usual ones: the real unique tasting and great quality food! I find it is great to create one place, a hub that could gather all of those unique foodies.
Also it is a step to initiate a catalyst for those who love to cook special dishes in their home by encouraging them to create their own menu/home restaurants and start accepting orders at least in their free days and times.
EG: What is your background?
AK: I’m holding an MSc. in Parametric Architectural engineering. I have more than five years’ experience in startups field as I’ve founded and managed parametric interior solutions for manufacturing interior and furniture special units. Then, I started last year my new tech app SPOON.
EG: What are the issues you are solving and what is your value proposition?
AK: We are working on solving the lack of tools and communication between homemade food startups/catering and users who are looking for suitable/affordable catering service for creating various kinds of events.
Also we want to fill the gap between both vendors and customers by offering lots of customising and e-payment tools. Moreover, we are linking food startups with the target users through creating a homemade food gathering community to ensure enhancing the quality of their services, maximising their brand exposure.
EG: Tell us more about the process, users, business model.
AK: We are working on the idea of encouraging food lovers to create their own food menu from home by helping and providing them with all support and tools powered by us, so they can establish their brand and start receiving orders online in an easy way through our platform.
Our users are those home-food/catering startups, who suffer from the hassle of taking unorganised orders only by replying to a lot of messages in their social media accounts without the ability to manage daily capacity, future reservations and online payments.
In addition, we seek users who are looking for suitable/affordable service for their events but can’t reach a lot of homemade foodies due to lack of exposure.
Our business model is commission-based, the service is totally free for user. We have two main revenue streams: first one is the direct revenue through getting commissions from service providers (catering/ kitchens) as post-paid marketing fees per orders; the second one is a fixed monthly subscription fee for extra analytical and marketing services.
EG: What are your main challenges?
AK: Our main challenges are the ability to build a solid base for a steady scalable track ensuring the quality of service and seriousness of our signed homemade partner, spreading the idea with the correct segment and target groups to help both parties get the required values.
EG: What are your achievements and future plans?
AK: We have closed deals with 20 home-made foodies-catering. Meanwhile, from our side we started our Ramadan campaign for ordering homemade iftar gatherings, ready-made meals (frozen), Ramadan desserts from various kitchens & food startups. We have adapted our app to be fully tailored for this kind of business ( reservations / events customisations / future ordering not same-day delivery).
Also, our app is providing a Virtual Drive-thru experience for pickup users and unique dine-in reservations and events creation with customised bookings.
We are to start new features of advanced events creation (cross-selling products) for helping users who want to create special events by making them easily gather and order all their required stuff from one place (not just the food).
EG: Do you think the ecosystem is helping you?
AK: There is more potential in the ecosystem, but still investments and funding support is still weak in terms of the benefits offered by investors to startups in the early stage.
We were willing to get more support to expose to the market. I hope the support will be enhanced to be equal to that in the Gulf and the West.
