Rebecca Barry Hill
Their success
f there was ever an example of a business that likes to move quickly, it’s My Food Bag. “Cecilia and James [ Robinson] are the fastest executors I’ve ever met and I think anyone who has ever worked with them totally agrees,” says co- founder Nadia Lim.
Four years ago, the Robinsons, with Lim and her husband, Carlos Bagrie, and former Telecom chief executive Theresa Gattung, launched the food delivery service to a few hundred people in Auckland. Since then My Food Bag has grown from a team of five to a company of 120, pumping out nutritious recipes and delivering ingredients weekly from Invercargill to Whangarei.
Not even company mastermind Cecilia Robinson could foresee just how much – and how quickly – the brand would grow. Last October they secured investment from private equity firm Waterman Capital, part of a long- term strategy to prepare for an IPO within three years.
MFB’s forecast revenue for the 2017 financial year is expected to exceed $ 135m. On a more intimate level, it has quickly become the busy person’s best friend, a brand its users engage with, in their own homes, several times a week.
“When I wrote the business plan I had some big, aspirational, hairy goals,” says Robinson, “but did we think we’d be here? Probably not.” “Well not this fast,” laughs Lim. We’re in the boardroom at MFB’s HQ at the top of Parnell Rd, and something that smells like spaghetti bolognaise is wafting from the test kitchen next door. Working here is certainly advantageous when it comes to a free lunch, but it can also be hell. When Robinson was pregnant, there were days she’d get a whiff of meat sizzling in the pan and make a nauseous dash for the bathroom.
These days, it’s a convenient central point from where she can whip home during the day to care for her son Thomas, 4, and baby daughter Leila. Soon she’ll be nipping home from MFB’s custom- built headquarters further down the road, yet another indication of the company’s fast rise to success.
Rather than sitting on their laurels, Robinson and Lim say they’re as fired up as ever, always looking to the next phase of growth. That means continuing the transition phase with Waterman, and expanding on their new product lines, which this year saw them introduce vegetarian and gluten- free options and a bag for single- person households, alongside their food bags for families and couples.
They also launched My Express Bag, targeting the time- poor with prechopped ingredients and quicker- toprepare meals. Express is an apt label for it – it was a matter of mere weeks from idea to execution, a typically fast turnaround that Lim puts down to her colleague, aka “the Swedish blonde blur” as a journalist once described Robinson.
But MFB’s biggest product launch in the past year was My Bargain Box. Targeting families on a budget, Bargain Box offers meals from about $ 5.30 a plate, and now accounts for nearly half the business.
“Cecilia has her head so close to the customer and instinctively knows what they want,” says Lim. “As soon as she clicks on to that, she’ll be telling everyone what we’re going to do. Straight away she’s in action. I’ve never met anyone who dives into it that fast.”
That guns- blazing approach spearheaded the business four years ago. Inspired by a similar product in Sweden, the Robinsons were keen to make use of the exposure Lim’s recent MasterChef win and cooking show had given her, by bringing her on board as the face of the brand.
For Lim, a dietician whose no- fuss, natural “Nude Food Philosophy” underpins all the recipes, the success