When people hear that I founded an açaí business they tend to picture me behind a counter, and I should say up front that I don’t make the bowls. My side of Acai Berry Foods is the finance and planning: the budgets, what goes into each bowl and what it costs us, what each shop costs to keep open, and whether a new site makes sense before anyone signs a lease. It is the less photogenic half of the business, and in my experience it is the half that decides whether there is ever a second shop.
Some background first. Acai Berry Foods started in London in 2016 with a fairly simple idea, which was to serve açaí the way it is served in Brazil, as a properly frozen bowl with fruit and granola on top, rather than as a smoothie or a powder. There are eight shops in London, four in the United Arab Emirates, one in New York, and an online shop for the products you can keep at home. I founded it and put my own money into it, and my role has always been on the numbers side rather than behind the counter.
A busy shop is not the same as a profitable one
If you are thinking about opening a food business, this is the thing I would most want you to understand before you do it. You can stand outside a shop on a Saturday afternoon, see a queue out of the door, and still know almost nothing about whether the business makes money.
There are a few common reasons a busy shop loses money. The rent is wrong for the street, so even good trading cannot cover it. The staffing rota was built for Saturday and then runs the same way on a quiet Tuesday. Ingredients are being thrown away because the ordering is based on what we hope to sell rather than what we sold last week. Or the delivery apps are taking a share of each order that nobody has looked at properly, because it comes off before the money ever reaches the account.
Açaí makes the waste problem worse than most products, because the base is frozen and keeps, while the fruit on top does not. You are managing two shelf lives at once. When the ordering is not tied to actual sales the waste figure creeps up slowly, and because it does not show up as a single event, nobody notices until the quarter is added up.
So the numbers I spend my time on are not the exciting ones. I look at what each bowl costs in ingredients, recipe by recipe rather than as an average. I look at staff hours against the number of transactions, by hour of the day if the till can give it to me. I look at rent and utilities as a share of what the shop takes, at what the delivery platforms leave us after their commission, at how much the average customer spends and, more usefully, whether they come back, and at which items on the menu make money and which only look good in photographs.
That last one causes the most arguments. There is always a bowl that everybody loves, that gets shared online, and that does not cover the cost of its own fruit. My view is that it is a marketing cost, and that is fine, but it should be recorded as one rather than described as a product.
London
London was the right first city, and I don’t think that is hindsight. It has people from everywhere, including a good number who already knew what açaí was and had firm opinions about how it should be served. It has a café culture that will try anything once. And underneath the fads there is a genuine interest in eating better, which is what a product like this needs if it is going to survive beyond the novelty stage.
What made the London shops work was not any one clever decision. The sites were central and were chosen on the rent arithmetic above rather than on a feeling about the street. The shops were designed to look the way the product tastes. We were open about what goes into the bowl, because the customer who reads the ingredients is usually the customer who comes back. And there was a lot of local work that does not scale and does not photograph well: events, explaining to people what açaí actually is, and working with people online who already liked it. I wrote about the London launch separately, so I will not repeat it here.
If I had to pick one lesson from London it is that the customer judges the whole visit and not just the bowl. Whether the counter was clean, how the staff spoke to them, whether ordering took ten seconds or two minutes, whether the delivery arrived looking like the picture. Any one of those can lose the second visit, and the second visit is where the business is. The first one is only an introduction.
Dubai
When a concept works there is a strong temptation to copy it exactly and drop it into the next city. We did not do that in Dubai, and I would argue against it with anyone who wanted to.
Dubai made sense as a second market because there is a wellness culture there and a customer who cares what they eat. But the eating habits are different, the regulations are different, the competition is different, and what people wanted on the menu was not what London wanted. So most of the work before opening was research: what people there already ate, what was missing from the market, how the shop should be laid out, and who we needed to work with locally. The Dubai opening has its own post as well.
The way I have come to think about it is that a brand has a core and a surface. The core is the product quality, the ingredient standards, how the place looks and how a customer is treated. The surface is everything else: the menu combinations, the portion sizes, the promotions, the seasonal items, the pricing, the delivery partners, the words on the wall. You can change the surface as much as the local market asks you to, and you should. You should not touch the core. If you do it the other way round you have opened a different business under the same sign.
The website counts as a shop
This part gets neglected and I understand why, because it is not very interesting. But people discover us in a shop and then order from the website later, or the other way round, and if the product information is different in the two places, or the opening hours on the site are out of date, you lose someone over nothing. The requirement is simple enough to say in one line, which is the same photos, the same descriptions, the same prices and a delivery that turns up, and it still takes work every week to keep it true.
Brazil
The business has put money into environmental work connected with Brazil, and into charities working on the Amazon and on education. I have put this last and kept it short on purpose. I think the test of whether a food company means any of this is whether it shows up in the accounts rather than on the About page, and I would rather be judged on that.
If you are opening your first shop
Put the financial controls in before the second site, not after it. Almost everyone does it after, and it is much harder then.
Go into a new market assuming you know nothing about it, because you don’t, and do the research as if your money depended on it.
Keep the core of the brand identical everywhere and change the surface freely.
And look after the regulars. The events, the explaining, the community work are not marketing that sits on top of the business. They are the business, because a bowl is easy to sell once and the whole job is selling it the three hundredth time.