The world’s an oyster for Woop meal kit founder
Calculated risk is what Thomas Dietz thrives on.
The Parisian, who has been living in Auckland for the past 15 years, says taking risks has always paid off, in some way or another, when it comes to business.
The founder of high-end meal kit company World On Our Plate (Woop) says the business has more than doubled since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and is on track to hit a milestone of having delivered 10 million meals since its inception, by the end of the year.
Prior to launching Woop, Dietz founded fresh ready-to-eat meal company Tomette, selling in Farro, Nosh and New World.
Dietz says Tomette was trying to solve the same problem Woop was founded on: bringing restaurant quality meals to busy working couples who had little time to cook.
‘‘I was trying to solve this problem that was actually my problem, our family’s problem,’’ Dietz says through a thick French accent that belies how long he has been in New Zealand.
‘‘We were selling the meals in supermarkets. I did lots of samples of product and the feedback I got from the consumer base – specifically mums – they said the meals were really good, but they felt guilty not doing anything to feed their family but putting something in the oven or microwave. So we went back to the drawing board to look at how we could do that differently.’’
He sold the business in 2016, not long after establishing Woop.
Dietz says most meal kit companies across the world are doing the same thing, delivering a box of ingredients and recipes to cook dinner each week, but he thought there was a better way of doing it.
He started to explore the concept of having all the food preparation done in advance, such as making dressing and dicing vegetables. ‘‘The feedback we got was people weren’t against doing a few shortcuts, so we thought to introduce the French concept of mise en place, which is what chefs do all over the world prior to you arriving: all the preparation of the food so when you place your order you are not going to wait 45 minutes or an hour for your food.’’
He says his business aims to allow consumers to keep ‘‘the magic of cooking for themselves’’.
The father-of-one says the prepared ingredients are what sets it apart from competitors.
Woop is also the only meal kit company doing reverse-logistics, he says, picking up the previous box and packaging when it delivers a fresh one, to ensure all packaging is recycled. Its packaging is used to make plastic fence posts for vineyards.
Woop launched seven years ago, but like most meal kit companies, it did its best business during the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns.
My Food Bag has experienced a halving of profit in its recent annual earnings, but Dietz says Woop’s business has been sustained and is not seeing rapid subscription cancellations.
It was on the Deloitte Fast 50 list, named as one of the country’s fastestgrowing businesses, between 2018 to 2021. It was also named the fastestgrowing food business two years in a row.
‘‘We really focus on the quality of what we do and getting amazing recipes. We have a team of Kiwis that are well-travelled and sourcing recipes from all around the world using local ingredients.’’
Beauty giant beginnings
Dietz was born and grew up in Paris before moving overseas in his 20s.
He lived in Canada, Venezuela and travelled a lot in his 20s and 30s, spending time between China, Korea, Japan and South America, spending on average about three days a month in his home city.
Before permanently basing himself in New Zealand in 2008, Dietz lived in Melbourne.
When he and his wife first moved to New Zealand with their young daughter, Dietz was working for beauty giant L’Oreal.
The pair decided after six months in the country to stay here.
‘‘I always thought I wanted to live on an island, I never realised it would be such a big island,’’ Dietz laughs.
Dietz graduated from cole des Mines university as an engineer, but says he always had an interest in marketing and a curiosity as to how the corporate world operated. He also studied finance and marketing at Concordia University in Canada.
‘‘Before joining the corporate world, I worked for the founder of a start-up in Paris for a year and I always knew that I wanted to start a business and be an entrepreneur,’’ says Dietz.
In his corporate job, he worked across L’Oreal’s supply chain operations and managed some of the group’s merger and acquisitions projects before working his way up to chief operating officer.
When he satisfied his curiosity about the corporate world of business he reverted to his original plan to start his own. He left L’Oreal without any idea of the type of business he would start.
He has always been on the hunt for a problem to solve – the basis for any good business, he says.
‘‘We love eating and eating well, and I love cooking, but when I have the time. For me going out to a market on a Saturday morning and buying amazing ingredients, and spending two or three hours cooking and having a long lunch ... that’s the dream [scenario] but I can’t do that during the week, so I was thinking what are some of the good ways of still having the same result and recipes but making it do-able.’’
Dietz is tight-lipped on how many meal boxes Woop sends out each year, but teases it is in the millions.
He says Woop is not the country’s largest meal kit firm, nor does it have the appetite to be.
‘‘We have this premium positioning, appealing to busy professional working families and couples.’’
The office gong
The Woop culture is fittingly centred on food.
Dietz says the 100-person team based in Eden Terrace tries new restaurants together once a month, and has regular lunches that include either having a chef-cooked meal at the office or heading out to a restaurant.
There is a bit of an unspoken rule that when anyone heads off on annual leave overseas that they return with inspiration for new meal ideas.
Dietz says the team takes customer ratings seriously – and whenever it receives a five-star rating someone is sure to hit the office gong to make it known.
It also rings the gong when it executes on its strategies, he says.
Dietz says the past two years for Woop have been ‘‘amazing’’. He says he found it humbling to be able to serve more New Zealanders during the difficult months of lockdowns.
‘‘We got amazing growth in two very special years. We’ve stabilised the business at a really good level that is double the size of what it was preCovid.’’
During the first week of lockdown, the business hired 27 people following ‘‘very steep growth’’ and in the months following hired more staff, plus 15 flight attendants. It still has former flight attendants on its books today.
‘‘Some of them have really enjoyed having a settled life and started some families and working for a business they are passionate about.’’
In the past year, Woop has hired about 20 staff.
Dietz says inflation and rising food costs were pushing the business to constantly negotiate long-term agreements with local suppliers and finding win-win situations to be able to leverage economies of scale.
Some people sign up to meal kits as a way to save money and avoid going to the supermarket where there is the possibility for impulse buys, he says.
He describes his leadership style as collaborative, but says he knows the value of staying focused on one thing and doing that one thing really well.
As a board member of Entrepreneurs’ Organisation (EO), he is part of a network of 17,000 entrepreneurs around the world.
Next month he is set to become president for the New Zealand chapter of EO with 120 entrepreneurs.
He says being part of the group has been invaluable, and he got lots of ideas and energy from learning from others and attending various conferences.
The next seven years
Dietz says Woop is constantly working on the quality of its product, and is invested in using artificial intelligence and machine learning to be able to offer a more tailored experience to each of its customers.
He says the business is always trying to improve its impact on the environment by reducing its carbon footprint. It was recently certified carbon-neutral, offsetting its emissions by planting native trees.
But its big focus currently is taking Woop global. He wants to see boxes being delivered in Europe and Australia and is exploring the opportunity on the west coast of the United States.
‘‘I set up and built everything up knowing that we would launch in other countries. We really wanted to make sure before we were doing that, that we have nailed every aspect of the business and have raving fans. There is no point trying to scale a product that is OK but not great.’’
At the moment, the team is looking at which markets to launch into next.
‘‘We are conducting some studies at the moment to have a look at the market opportunities and identifying what exists in different markets.
‘‘We haven’t found many countries that have the same kind of offer of premium accessible positioning, doing all the preparation of food in advance,’’ he says.
‘‘We still need to do our homework and still want to do some proper market validation.
‘‘One of the mistakes I learned from in my previous business Tomette is that we did a very light market validation, so before launching Woop we did a proper´marketE validation; I did 200 interviews with customers, 100 of them were face-to-face,’’ he says.
Even with inflation being at record highs around the world and rising living costs skyrocketing, Dietz isn’t nervous about the upcoming expansion offshore.
‘‘Being an entrepreneur, I’m always quite positive and optimistic. I like risk, but a measured risk approach,’’ he says. ‘‘There are really good ways of mitigating risk – but that’s what drives me and excites me.’’
‘‘I was trying to solve this problem that was actually my problem, our family’s problem.’’ Thomas Dietz World On Our Plate (Woop) founder