Wetaca in depth: from Masterchef to revolutionizing tuppers from digital, with Andrés Casal
We are going to talk to the CEO of Wetaca, Andrés Casal. Wetaca is a subscription food delivery project, focused on people who want to eat well but don’t want or don’t have time to cook. To resolve the issue of food for students or for those of us who eat from tupperware in the office.
In the talk, the subject of influencers came up and we came up and ended up registered and with a special coupon to be able to offer you €20 free on your first order in Wetaca. The code is M4C, of course, so listen to the interview and if you end up surrendering at your feet, do it with our coupon, which is how the Marketing4eCommerce team will polish it in tuppers.
⭐Program Sponsor: Pipedrive
Interview Andrés Casal (Wetaca)
5:28 How did the idea of creating Wetaca come about?
During university Efrén (my partner) and I talked a lot about business, about what we would like to set up something and about food. We were always looking for new restaurants, new foods, and new ingredients to try.
After I graduated, I lived in Madrid with a recent graduate salary and many expenses, so I couldn’t spend 250 or 300 euros to eat out. Also, I didn’t like the menus of the day, I always ate supermarket dishes that weren’t very good either.
Efrén studied a second cycle degree and while he finished he began to cook in his apartment and set up a blog that ended up in the first edition of MasterChef. He then did an internship with Jordi Cruz Mas and realized that restaurants have one day of production to prepare large amounts of stir-fry, broths and sauces, which are packaged and cooled to be taken out on the menus of the week.
Taking this production idea and looking at my feeding problem, He brought up the idea of cooking on Sundays., divide the portions into individual servings to pack and take to work. We started in his apartment and we cooked first for ourselves, then for our friends and then we set up our first workshop.
10:23 I also see that you put in the description “We started with €150 in a kitchen in a shared apartment and today we are more than 50 people who cook more than 50,000 meals every week.” How was this evolution?
we started in January 2015, with a kitchen of 60 square meters, just Efrén and me cooking, cleaning and making deliveries. We lasted one year and 9 months and we moved to a 650 square meter workshop, where we lasted one year. In 2018 we moved again to a kitchen of 6,500 meters squares, which is where we are currently, in the community of Madrid in Villaverde.
We have considered the idea of having smaller kitchens, distributed in different places, due to the operational risk involved in having everything in one place. When you cook you are exposed to accidents, fires and more.
13:28 Now my fetish questions: key data for our listeners to size up the brand:
Team you have
In 2021 we billed 9.5 million euros and we close 2022 with a total of 13 million euros of turnover.
The team is made up of approx. 90 people. About 65% is dedicated to the operational part, cooks, food preparation before cooking, portioning, packers, order picking.
The rest of the team deals with the business part, which is divided into marketing, product, developers and creativity.
Markets in which you are present
For now we only work in Spain, we still don’t have any internationalization plan. We are focused on growing in Spain, because we believe that our market can be very large only in Spain, so it makes sense to continue.
15:24 How much does your subscription cost? Because I see that you highlight a lot the “try it for 15 euros”
When entering the page you can see the individual price of the dishes. Our subscription model is very flexible and is renewed every week. Every Wednesday, before 12 at night, you can decide whether to cancel, pause or make any changes to it. If you do not enter by default, the menu you have programmed will be sent. Orders are delivered on Fridays.
Besides, weekly we make menu suggestions based on the dishes of the first delivery or the dishes that you have configured within the subscription. This way, you can leave your menu as it is or you can make any changes you prefer.
Our shipping model is also weekly. In other words, one day a week we send all the dishes in the order, which you can store in the fridge and heat whenever you want. Meals last between a week and 10 days from the time you receive it.
Currently, between 8,000 and 10,000 people eat thanks to Wetacabecause there are orders that are for more than one person.
We have a average ticket of approximately 30 euros, although it varies a lot according to the season or season. In vacation times, like summer, or Christmas, many people have more time to cook at home or go out to restaurants, so our orders drop a bit.
Our users ask between 6 and 7 dishes per order, which tells us that there are people who eat with us every day, including weekends.
On the other hand, we have two sections in the subscription when you sign up, it can be before or after you have chosen your dishes, in which you can tell us about your joys, your tastes, if you follow a specific diet and based on this data. We make menu recommendations.
21:17 Did you use any reference to create the website?
Our website is made in JavaScript, It is self-developed. We didn’t really have any reference website or startup. When we start We did not know of any company that had the same business model as us, Which makes us wonder if it made sense, but more competition has come out over the years.
As we tell on our page, we start with 150 euros, With which we bought a domestic vacuum sealer using the MasterChef gift card, with a normal stove with three burners and an oven. Our family gave us 17,000 euros each, with which we set up our first kitchen. At first we thought it was very slow because we did not invest in marketing and we had bad packaging, which was just a bag where we wrote the name of the dish.
Once we validated our business model, that we could have good profit margins and grow, we thought about investing in marketing, improving packaging and having more customers, so we managed close a round in September 2016 for 300,000 euros.
In 2017 we had great growth, we went from selling around 20,000 euros in January to 115,000 euros in June. In July 2017 we closed a second round of 1,050,000 euros, with which we managed to move to the kitchen we have today.
Approximately since the summer of 2019 we are profitable. We always seek maximum growth, but in profitability.
30:58 How do you work marketing?
At first we thought of trying different capture channels, we worked a little more on our social networks making content. In addition, we create in plan “Member get member” and we gave discounts on the first purchase, both for the new client and for the person who recommended it.
We also have different email marketing strategies and some network ads, although our recruitment has always been fundamentally organic. About 80% is organic (by word of mouth) and direct traffic.
We try to work all social networks, but we are stronger on instagram, where we already have more than 170 thousand followers. That visual point that this platform offers is excellent for meals. We are trying different strategies to find out which one works best.
The first campaign we launched was on the blog madrid-confidential, which is now called city-confidential. A friend from college, who was working with one of its creators, encouraged us to send them a request to be put on it. Thanks to that publication we went from selling 50 orders a week to 100 weekly orders.
35:24 I understand that they also work with influencers
Yes, we work with influencers to whom we leave the order free up to certain euros. We are quite flexible we do not make any type of contract about what to say or the number of posts and post, we just send you the food and if you like it you post it. We give them the freedom to publish or not.
Early on, when we started developing our member get member plan, there came a point where the 30% of our recruitment came from here, So we looked for a way to scale this plan to grow more, so we started working with influencers. We did a little test that worked very well and we have scaled it quite a bit.
We do not have a specific type of influencerThe most important thing is authenticity, real people who tell their lives or opinions, who really generate or have a capacity to influence their followers.
39:28 Imagine that a media outlet like us offers you to do a collaboration so that you feed their employees two days a week, what agreement would you reach? Yes, I confess, we want you to feed us. Reach an agreement!!! 😉 XDD
A few months ago we launched a B2B model which is working very well for us, with which companies can pay for all or part of the food for their workers.
The recruitment for this business model is more inbound than outbound. At the moment we do not transfer from B2C to B2B. For now, only companies that are interested in the service contact us directly, because our principal is the B2C, where we have more than 99% of the income.
39:47 What plans/challenges do you have in Wetaca for 2023/2024?
We want to continue at the same percentages of growth and We expect to close 2023 with 16 or 17 million in billing.
We have always focused on customers, on meeting their needs and adapting to their problems, in order to build our digital product based on what they ask of us. For 2023 we are focusing on healthy food and we have already differentiated two sections: one with more abundant food and others with light lunches or dinners. The latter were kind of boring, because we were so focused on health and forgot about taste, so now we’re balancing the elements.
We have a window for order deliveries of an hour and a half and 94% of our orders are delivered on time. This year we are to improve that delivery time and reduce the remaining 6%.
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