AN ALTERNATIVE TO TAKEAWAY WITH HOBBY CHEFS TO STIMULATE SOCIAL COHESION

The simplest ideas can change the world. That is what Mahmoud El Wakil was convinced of when he started with Homemade: a platform on which you can order home-cooked food from your neighbors. By empowering home chefs, Mahmoud aims to strengthen local communities. After all, what connects people more than food? 

This story was first published in the Next Icons Magazine. You can read the entire magazine here.

Where did the hunger for home-cooked food come from? 

Mahmoud: “Ordering food is not new, of course. However, every time I ordered from a restaurant, I was dissatisfied with the price and quality of the food. Meanwhile, when I entered my apartment building, I smelled the amazing odors of meals my neighbors would cook. I figured: what if people could order home-cooked meals from people from their community who love to cook, instead of ordering at a restaurant? That’s what we’re doing with Homemade. We’re switching up the dynamics so the money flows back into the community, instead of large restaurant chains. We’re shortening the supply chains to build the future of hyper-local, sustainable cities.” 

That sounds as if you're aiming bigger than ‘just’ ordering food from your neighbors.

Mahmoud: “That’s true. Ultimately, I’d like to see a change in how people communicate, connect, and consume food. I believe food can bring people closer together. When you order from a restaurant, they just deliver your food and are off to the next customer as soon as possible. When you order from a neighbor, they often stop to chat.”

I imagine they would also be more grateful when you order from them, right?

Mahmoud: “Absolutely, because sometimes you help the chefs to realize their dreams. But it goes further than that. For a stay-at-home mother, it could be an opportunity to make some money on the side and support her independence. Here in the Netherlands, we have a pretty good level of gender equality, but in other parts of the world, you don’t. Homemade could really make an impact in those countries. For example, I’m from Egypt, and women there don’t have the same opportunities as women in the Netherlands. However, they often make the most delicious meals. Homemade gives people - and especially women - the opportunity to provide for themselves and strengthen their communities.”   

Basically, you give them the opportunity to run a small business. How does Homemade facilitate that? 

Mahmoud: “We have a special platform for the chefs, which we constantly upgrade. Last year, we launched our software that can host many chefs and automate notifications when an order is placed. We also have a whole onboarding process where we help new chefs craft their menus, determine the pricing, help them take photographs of the menu items, and make marketing content. We use AI for those processes. For example, you cannot expect a home chef to stock up on loads of different ingredients. We use AI to determine what recipes a chef could make with as few ingredients as possible. We worked hard to optimize our onboarding process, and I think we can now say we’ve cracked the code. We had many successful experiments, and also many unsuccessful experiments. That’s the only way to figure out what works. You must be persistent, but if anyone could make it happen, it's us.”  

Why is that?

Mahmoud: “In the past year, we really expanded our team, so now we have a very diverse and dedicated team. Most team members work as hard as I do, while they don’t have to. But they believe in what we do. You need to put in the work. It’s about having stamina. Entrepreneurship is not a sprint, but it’s showing up every single day for a long period, while ensuring you keep your mind fresh for new ideas. We took many steps in the past year, but meeting the right people might be among the most important.”

It’s clear that you center people in your business. Is innovation also about people, according to you?

Mahmoud: “Innovation is finding a way to make a change. In our case, it’s a change in people's behavior. That’s how you change the world, after all: small actions taken by a large group of people. For example, if everyone decided only to buy biological produce in the supermarket, companies would invest more in biological food because they know consumers want that. Change can happen like that, but you must question the way things are. Don’t accept the world as it is, but look at it from a different perspective and see how small changes can make a difference.”  

Does innovation then come from hard work or luck? 

Mahmoud: “Well, the harder you work, the luckier you get. That might sound cliche, but it rings true to me. So in that sense, you could say that innovation comes from both. It’s never just luck and never just hard work. The two go hand in hand. And hopefully, there’s still a lot of luck to come for us!”