Cook more and try new food. This is the simple idea of Marley Spoon. With 7 new recipes from top chefs every week and delivery of all required ingredients Marley Spoon inspires their customers all over Germany.
Marley Spoon is growing strongly and is currently hiring a QA Engineer and a Javascript Engineer. Immigrant Spirit talked to Jonas Erich, Head of Marketing, about Marley Spoon’s tasty mission.
IS: Jonas, you have a very young company. Tell us about your mission: What do you want to achieve?
Jonas: Our long term mission is to bring people back into the kitchen. We want to bring market fresh, delightful and easy cooking back to the people.
Easy means: Our main asset is the recipe. It’s recipes that you might not normally think of – but you should not be scared to try them. Ultimately everyone should be able to cook this recipe with our help, our recipe card. And the outcome should be amazing. We want to inspire people and encourage them to cook more and more great food and make sure it is easy to do so.
Delightful, we say because we think that cooking should be an experience. Cooking is something we cut a bit short nowadays. We want to create this cooking experience from A to Z. You get the best recipes, the best ingredients and you really know how to put all that together in 40 minutes max.
Market fresh: Organic whenever possible, but always from quality producers and transparent about the source. Our aim is to get fresher food faster to the people.
IS: What was the main kick for you personally, starting to work for Marley Spoon?
Jonas: The main kick was the physical product. In e-commerce you often work for websites or an app. Here you have a product that you can touch. Ultimately the product that we send out lets to an amazing dish. It gives you inspiration to cook more and try new combinations. I love cooking – so for me it was quite an easy call there.
IS: And you literally see the results of your work here… (Marley Spoon has a an amazing open kitchen in the centre of the companies office space)
Jonas: We have our test kitchen here. Professional chefs come in, test cook here – we get to try the food.
IS: Your colleague is cooking something right now. Do you know what she is cooking?
Jonas: I don’t know. I think it’s rice. Every employee gets to test-cook our recipes. And you can smell it – we smell what we sell. (laughs)
IS: You are a very young company, but your founders are really experienced…
Jonas: Fabian is a serial entrepreneur with experience in Europe and America. (Fabian Siegel was one of the founders of Delivery Hero among others. The Editor) And we have Till Neatby, who is experienced in food. He had a franchise company who dealt in Mexican food.
It’s great to have this combination of full-on entrepreneurship and full-on food experience. On top of that: They are both friends. They have travelled together and they created Marley Spoon out of their shared love for cooking.
IS: Do you feel the difference of having an experienced founder?
Jonas: Sure. Clear answer. You feel it most in the moving forward pace. Not only in the founding team: Most of the core team has worked together before. So you don’t have this time where you have to get to know each other. Instead you can dive into work right away. Also people settle in a lot faster. The pace in which we have been moving is the result of the experience and the collaboration that we could display from day one.
IS: What is your main goal for this year?
Jonas: The main goal is to optimise the product. We sell experiences and that translates directly into the product. In Term of the website and the app we want the best possible interface and the best experience. Have a really smooth order flow, but also have a lot of information on that. So that we can convey transparency that we want to achieve when it comes to food. In terms of the box: We want to create a “wow” factor. We want to make it personal. So we put handwritten notes of the person who packed it, into every single box. We have the recipe cards that tell stories around the product. And we have packaging that is ecological and a cooling system that you can send back. We want to create a product that people can’t say no to.
IS: For great experiences you need great people in the team.
Jonas: When it comes to expansion into other countries: The copywriters play an important role. Especially when it comes to recipes. It’s not easy to write recipes. You have to be extremely concise, in the title, in the step-by-step descriptions and obviously you need native speakers with experience for that.
You can’t have one person write them for all markets – you need to localize this. And those editors can take ownership of the whole content creation. That involves marketing as well. You want to have one tone of voice across all channels.
Have you made the same experience?
You are well educated, you have professional experience and most important: You have drive and ambition. You want to make a contribution and build a good career.
But German employers don't value your talent. You apply for job after job. You spent hours editing your CV and cover letter to fit perfectly. And then: You don't even get an answer.
There is a way forward! Chris Pyak and the rest of us at Immigrant Spirit GmbH: We want you to succeed.
Comments are closed.