Meelz, A Marketplace That Empowers Chefs To Create & Sell Their Products And Services Directly To Customers Is Now Available In Dubai – UAE

Press release

10/08/21

Meelz operates on 5 different business verticals: Food delivery, Recipe box delivery, Grocery & kitchenware delivery, Masterclass experiences and Chef’s tables experiences.

It boasts some of the most influential Chefs in the Middle east, in the likes of Karim Bourgi, Gregoire Berger and Greg Malouf, also signing leading food purveyors like Chef Middle East, Kitchenware distributor MG hotels, as well as strategic partnerships with an array of culinary institutions.

Co-founded by, BasselSiblini and The Lab holding, a Venture Building studio with a focus on Food-tech, F&B and Hospitality sectors.

BasselSiblini, Meelz’s CEO, describes the opportunity that Meelz is tapping into:

“Chefs are the centre of the food world. They work wonders with basic ingredients, but their real magic lies in their capacity to tell stories through food experiences. This is what we want to capitalize on. Through the virtues of social media, Chefs now have a platform to communicate directly with a large following of fans that are loyal, but more importantly monetizable. This is ultimately what Meelz is really about: Empower Chefs to take a more active role in the food value chain, to the benefit of all stakeholders Cloud kitchens, 3PLs, Vendors of Food, beverage, Kitchenware, venue owners and more. The possibilities are limitless. “ 

Led by a team of industry veterans with backgrounds in F&B, restaurant operations, e-commerce and marketing, Meelz received a pre-seed investment of $350,000 in October 2020 from The Lab holding to bring the idea to life.

“The chefs as talents, have not got their fair share of attention in the food business world despite their indispensable roles, loyal followers and artistic creations” Says Tarek Taji, Head of Project and Portfolio Manager at the Lab Holding. “The platform aims to capture a low hanging fruit opportunity by enabling and commercially activating the central players of the food industry, the chefs, and create a win-win situation for all, from customers to manufacturers” he adds.

The market in general was moving towards this direction.  Celebrity chef and Chefpreneurs were terms that were popping up around the world to reflect a new movement towards an elegant interest in fine food and culinary experience overall. However, The COVID-19 and its frequent lockdowns came to expedite this movement towards not only the digitization of transactions plus food delivery but everything from buying home kitchenware to attending online cooking classes.

Today’s market is highly driven by Millennials’ behavior of both genders and there’s a plenty of data that illustrates rise of followership and eating out phenomenon by this segment who are increasingly looking for new experiences.

A survey by Bankrate found that for “three times a week, 54 percent of younger millennials (ages 18 to 26) eat out and 30 percent buy coffee … and the average millennial eats out five times a week.” We see this trend in most of the OECD countries “Each year, millennials spend about $2,242 at the grocery store and $1,672 dining out adding up to around 1,140 hours devoted to food (time spent meal-prepping, cooking, and eating out)” a survey of 2,000 millennial consumers commissioned by United States’ plant-based food company Sweet Earth Foods reveals.

An article by foodnetwork also states that “87 percent of millennials say they’re willing to splurge on a nice meal out, even if money is in short supply.” A 2020 KPMG lower-gulf publications also states that “There is a shift from fine dining toward premium casual concepts” regionally and the data strongly suggests that “Cuisine preferences are driven by the demographic mix of cosmopolitan cities, though East Asian, Indian, Levantine/ Middle Eastern and Italian dominate.”

When it comes to specialty e-commerce, Meelz doesn’t only open a new channel for cuisine loving consumers, but on top of that, it picks some of the best items which chefs endorse. According to a new report, Global Cookware Market, published by KBV research “The Global Cookware Market size is expected to reach $18.6 billion by 2027, rising at a market growth of 13.6% CAGR during the forecast period”.  This also coincide with some interesting data that is arising from the pandemic year of 2020 where bakeware sales in European region specifically has witnessed a remarkable spike over Q2 & Q3.

There’s an average of 40 Food-tech deal every quarter globally since 2015, with the majority of activity is via European intuitions when is comes to this industry. This has grown 2x compared to the period 2010-2015.

Meelz is currently available in a web version (meelz.me) and will soon debut on the two major App store Apple & Google Play store and ready to take on this new fast growing digital market.