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TALKPOINT
Building the differentiation Saad Umerani is the Co-Founder and CEO of Protein Bakeshop, a Dubai based healthy snacks company founded in 2014. Saad is also the Founding Partner at Enabling Future, a venture capital firm based out of Dubai. In this interview, he shares his insights on how Protein Bakeshop is consolidating in the region Discuss the Business operations of Protein Bakeshop and the unique value proposition of the Business? Protein Bakeshop is a healthy consumer packaged goods company, started out of the UAE. Protein Bakeshop is redefining healthy food by making it taste good. All our recipes are formulated by nutritionist Rashi Chowdhary. We live up to the strongest challenge when it comes to healthy, we are real healthy! diabetics can eat portions of our snack without insulin levels rising. We are currently working with select retailers and have a strong presence online. Elaborate how the company looked at expansion in terms of markets and what has been achieved so far? Right now we are focused on building a brand and growing our presence in the UAE. We have opened just 1 new market, which is India, due to the demand. We are doing well there, specially online. Discuss the growth for the company in its Business in terms of consumer acceptance and niche positioning? Our main customers who are looking to be healthy. When you have a desk job you are always looking for something to munch on, Protein Bakeshop is the perfect guilt free solution to that. Also when people are on the go they tend to eat a lot of junk food, we are the right on the go snack for them. The last few days, we have been focused on sampling. The first perception people of us, or any healthy food for SMART SMB | OCTOBER 2018
that matter is “I’m not sure how it will taste”, hence we want people to try. We also realized that our repeat orders were quire high - so as a new brand we are focused on getting more people to actually try it. Once people try it and read the macros, they realize that we are truly different from both a macro and taste perspective. Do you have your own stores? How many retailers do you partner with? We have no stores of our own, we are selling through other retailers. We are SUPER selective about whom we partner with. We have partnered with some of the top gyms like Dubai Ladies Club, TrainSF, Vogue Fitness, Motion Cycling and Pharaohs - cafes like: Tom & Serg, Tania’s Teahouse, Poke Poke, Frame and Retailers like: Milk & honey, Emarat, Scuzi and Choithram. And of course, you can find us online on our official website and platforms like deliveroo, noon. com, souq.comand others. Discuss your online presence? We have our official website, which does really well. We are also available on e-commerce giants like souq.com and noon.com as well as local startups like BulkWhizz. Elaborate on back office iCT processes and infrastructure that helps the operations? is there any big data analytics deployed? Data has become increasingly important for us to understand
SAAD UMERANI Co-Founder, CEO, Protein Bakeshop
our customers better and plan our next moves. Most of the data we have comes from our own website. We study which area most of our deliveries come from so we can focus on having more offline presence there. We study buying patterns on how first orders, second orders and third orders differ to understand how we can build packs to attach the first purchase and make the second purchase smoother. We also go more granular studying on which day and time our email open and click rates are the highest so we can make sure to send customers offers at the time they are available. Because we are mainly a food company and a lot of our business is offline, our use of data is limited. We use it mainly to create valuable offers, accessibility and buying journey