Page 20 - Food&Drink magazine July 2021

READY MEALS
Muscling in on meals
week with $5 million in revenue. “We’ve been fortunate to see
consistent growth in the business, and last year achieved $150 million in sales,” he says.
All of that growth in the first three years came purely from word of mouth and sampling at gyms. It wasn’t until its fourth year that the company put money into advertising online.
“It seems so basic, but in those first years we focused on product quality. We wanted to make sure it would never be compromised.
“It also helped that we were the target market, so we could directly relate to what consumers were looking for.”
All meals are made in-house and it has been a non-negotiable for the pair since day one.
“When we started, the market perception of ready meals was that they were bland, boring, and lacking in flavour, so the quality of our meals was going to be pivotal to our success.
”We are both control freaks and we knew from the outset that having all production in-house was the only way to
have full control over product quality,” he says.
TIME TO SCALE
In 2017, the business turned over $14 million with a financial outlook of $27
million for 2018.
The brothers realised
they needed help if they
were going to shift the business to the next level.
They hired marketing, design, operations and quality
assurance specialists; undertook market research based on the five years of data they had; and underwent a brand refresh.
But the biggest step they took was also what they saw, at the time, as a huge gamble – building their own factory.
Menon recalls, “Up until that point we had operated out of makeshift kitchens. We could have kept going at the pace we were at, but we made the conscious decision to grow.
“So, we reinvested everything we had earned in the last four years into constructing a state-of-the-art, custom built food manufacturing facility in Yennora, western Sydney.”
It took two hungry brothers looking for ready-meal options post gym work-out to create My Muscle Chef. Last year the brand made $150 million in sales. Kim Berry talks to co-founder Tushar Menon.
IN 2013, Tushar Menon was finishing off his business degree and working in a sales call centre for an insurance company. His brother, Nish, was also working full-time.
“The small amount of spare time I had I’d spend in the gym, so I struggled to find time to prepare the kind of food I needed, which led me to look into ready-made options,” Menon tells Food & Drink Business.
“Nish and I both wanted quality nutrition after our workouts, but we quickly found that there wasn’t much variety in the market.”
What Menon did find were products almost solely focused on weight-loss and very few
options with the
protein content the brothers were looking for.
SIDE HUSTLE BUSTLE
The brothers rented a small commercial kitchen in Sydney’s Potts Point and started My Muscle Chef as a side hustle while they worked full-time.
“We hired two staff through Gumtree and brought in our dad to help out when we started delivering meals to people. With such a small team to start, it really was all hands on deck. I would even drive across the state to ensure customers were happy with their meals in the early days,” Menon says.
Throughout that first year, in
2013, they were making 1600 meals a week,
growing the original customer base by sampling their meals at gyms around Sydney.
It became apparent very quickly that they had, indeed, identified a gap in the market. Just three months later, Menon quit his job at the call centre.
“After our first three months, we had about 300 customers spending $150 a week which is when I decided to quit my job.
“In its first year, My Muscle Chef brought in revenue of $827,000. By year two we were making around 3000 meals a week and brought in $1.5 million in revenue, and by year three we made 10,000 meals a
20 | Food&Drink business | July 2021 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au