How to make it in the world of… food

Ever dream of bottling and selling your grandma’s legendary hot and spicy sauce or mass-producing your own Mexican burritos? Well food is big business and one man who has first-hand experience of turning his passion for food into a career is Patrick Drake, Co-Founder and Head Chef of HelloFresh, the UK’s largest recipe box delivery service.

Patrick’s greatest passions are food, teaching and helping people get the most out of life which is why he also presents on Discovery, National Geographic and Fox TV and has created the world’s fastest cooking course www.the60secondchef.com.

I used to be a lawyer at Clifford Chance before I moved to Goldman Sachs and then decided enough was enough. I wasn’t interested in helping someone else build their dream. I had my own to pursue. Cooking was something I always loved, but beyond that I love to teach people. That’s when I decided I wanted to work in food and have my own TV show. So I worked in restaurants for free to improve my skills and started a Youtube channel to practice being in front of the camera. Many twists and turns later (including a little stint in The mind-blowingly cool Fat Duck in Bray) I met with the people who were to become my co-founders of HelloFresh in the UK. It was November 2011 and then in January 2012 we packed the first 10 bags of shopping in my living room. The company has grown a bit since then. Last month we delivered 8.5 million meals globally and I got the TV show too.

We’d seen similar concepts abroad and were very aware (from personal experience) that solving the challenge of cooking from scratch for busy city people would be a winner. So we designed the product around this premise, then subsequently found that it was a winner with a much wider market.

We could have spent months in research and development before launching HelloFresh only to find that we’d created something the market did not want. So instead of doing that we launched as soon as possible with a prototype. The product was really, really basic but it gave us a starting point and live feedback from real customers, rather than the misplaced encouragement of friends and relatives.

We also tried every way possible to market ourselves, from dressing up as carrots in Waterloo station (we got asked to leave by security) to running a speed omelette challenge at food events to whip up excitement. What we learned along the way is that there’s no substitute for the personal approach and that you get out what you put in. You could start a business thinking the best form of marketing is a massive billboard in Piccadilly Circus. But if people haven’t heard of your product or your concept before you need to put a passionate salesperson in front of them and show them why your business should become a part of their life. It’s old fashioned and it’s labour intensive, but it works.

As a company it’s our culture that sets us apart from everyone else. I’ve never worked with such a passionate, driven team before. We take what we do incredibly seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We have an egoless, meritocratic culture where anyone can challenge the status quo to help us improve what we’re doing. In fact I don’t even see us so much as a company as much as we are a movement on a mission to change the way people eat. Forever!

Our customers come from every walk of life. The one thing that unites them is a common desire to eat tasty, nutritious food. The responses we have from them are one of the greatest reasons for the passion we feel: we’re literally changing their lives. From the countless mothers who tell us that their kids are now helping to cook and therefore eating things they would never have tried before. To the weekly (half-joking) emails from the couples who say we’ve saved their marriage. Or the family who tell us that they’re actually spending time together as a family again around the dinner table instead of eating off their laps in front of the television. That’s what gets us up in the morning.

I love being able to help people get the most out of their lives. Cooking is a passion but the thing I love most is teaching. Whether it’s teaching people about food, or helping them create a life / job / business of their dreams, that’s the most satisfying. In work, as in life generally, the thing I least like is narrow-mindedness, ego and politics. I have a pretty straightforward solution for that though: I don’t put any energy into projects or people where those factors are present.

HelloFresh and www.the60secondchef.com are both businesses that rely intrinsically on the internet. If online marketing / social media is not your area of expertise then hire someone (or outsource) who can help build your online presence. You can’t handle every element of the business yourself. Stick to what you are good at and become world class at it.

For HelloFresh it’s all about improving on what we’ve already created. Making the recipes, the delivery, the packaging, everything even better. Personally I want to find even more ways of teaching people and making the whole cooking process even easier, whether through video, or most excitingly live streaming. The same goes for The 60 Second Chef. The online course teaches students everything they need to know about cooking in 60 second videos and I want it to become the absolute go-to destination for anyone who wants to discover their inner Chef, at their own pace, and be confident in the kitchen.

• Jump off the cliff and build the plane on the way down. Don’t spend months trying to create the perfect product before you launch. It will never be perfect. Get going with the minimum viable product and improve quickly with real feedback from real (paying) customers.
• Choose the best people to work with. Hire people who are better than you (without fear that they will make you look bad). Remember: Type A people hire type A people. Type B people hire type C people.
• Sales beats advertising: Don’t buy yourself a billboard when you start. It’s far more effective to have a team of passionate salespeople talking to potential customers one by one.
• Remember the mission! Under the pressure of making sales and shipping your product don’t forget WHY you started the company. Companies who have no purpose and no mission have a very shaky foundation for success.

Don’t listen to the naysayers. There will be a lot of people lining up to tell you why your idea won’t work. Don’t listen to them. In 9 out of 10 cases, their negativity is a reflection of their character rather than the strength of your idea.

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