Last year, the Oxford Dictionary added the word ‘hangry’ to its lexicon, further corroborating that the state of anger and irritability people experience on account of hunger is a very real phenomenon. Sydney-based start-up HowAboutEat recognises this propensity for people to become hangry—particularly in the context of our increasingly busy lives—and provides a solution: the delivery of high-quality lunches straight to people’s workplaces.
Less than a year old, the company is in a phase of active growth and is hitting some ambitious targets. However, no matter how big HowAboutEat’s scope grows, at its core is the philosophy that ‘Each customer is the most important customer’. The CEO Magazine spoke with HowAboutEat’s Managing Partner, Sergej Metelin, about the company’s roots and his vision for its future.
The CEO Magazine: Where did the concept for HowAboutEat come from?
Sergej: Like many people, my business partner, Giovanni Ravone, and I have incredibly busy lives. Last year, we realised that we were both frequently forgetting to have lunch. It would get to about 4pm and I would be starving and angry, and I’d promise myself that tomorrow I’d put time aside to go and get some lunch, only to have the same experience again. After conducting numerous customer interviews, we found that this problem is common.
We also found that lunch delivery affordability, variety, and quality was scarce in the market.
Through shining a light on a problem in our own lives, we found a tiny, little gap in the market that we could fill with HowAboutEat—an easy and cheap way to get lunch delivered to the office.
How does HowAboutEat work?
Once a minimum number of employees from a certain company register for our service, they receive our daily message, which features the ‘lunch of the day’, a high-quality meal sourced from a local restaurant. If a customer replies ‘Yes’ to our message, we deliver lunch to their reception between 12 and 12.30 pm. It’s that simple.
The start-up sector is growing exponentially. How do you ensure HowAboutEat succeeds in such a competitive space?
As we are tailored to deliver to a group versus one-on-one food delivery, we can offer the lowest delivery fees in the market. We are a disruption for food-delivery start-ups. Aside from having a unique model, I attribute our success to the fact that we’re constantly improving our operations platform.