(Vigo, 1989) He is one of the founders of Wetaca, a curious man who has revolutionized the foodtech sector in Spain thanks to his food containers. One in which the need to find a simple and fast way of eating, the passion for cooking, the passion of two entrepreneurs… and even the passage through a television program as well known as masterchef. To learn a little more about his story, we talked to Andrés.
Interview with Andrés Casal, Co-founder at Wetaca
Tuppers, eCommerce and lots of cooking. How did you come up with the idea?
Efren (my partner) and I are Galician and we met in Madrid when we arrived at the University. We lived in the same Colegio Mayor and were in the same class, we both loved to eat, we used to try many different restaurants, cuisines and products.
There came a time when I left my Erasmus and Efrén went to live in a flat. There he began to cook, he was passionate about it, he was very talented and read a lot, so he put it into practice and it always turned out well. He decided to set up a cooking blog and ended up participating in the first edition of Masterchef.
When he left there he went to train at Abac (three Michelin stars) with jordi cruz and learned that in haute cuisine restaurants many sauces, stocks and other preparations are prepared at the beginning of the week, they vacuum pack them and they put it on the menu for the whole week.
That year I just started working as CFO of a small textile company, I dedicated many hours to it and although I really liked eating/cooking the last thing I wanted to do when I got home was to cook the tupperware for the next day and dinner that night. Eating out every day with the salary of a recent graduate who pays his rent in Madrid was not feasible.
He knew my problem and in a few months the same thing was going to happen to him, so one day he called me when he was leaving Abac and told me how they used vacuum to preserve food, he also suggested: “Why don’t we cook on Sunday? we vacuum-pack it in individual portions and take it to work during the week?”-to which I said: Is it going to be good? and he replied: “Yes, it’s going to be great because we do it here in a restaurant with (at that time) two Michelin stars and it’s perfect.” So I told him: “If it’s good we sell it”.
So we started to do tests for 3 months in which we ate everything, we learned a lot about food conservation and we started making some friends’ tupperware.
How were those first months of Wetaca’s life? Did you think of throwing in the towel at some point?
they were toughwhen we left the kitchen at home and set up the first website and the first workshop we had no idea about anything. We spent a year working 70-80 hours a week, cooking, rationing, packing, cleaning, delivering and also trying to grow a business. During that year we only charge 3 months but In the end we managed to be profitable.
Yes, there was a critical moment at the end of july 2015 in which we sat down to talk and said: Either we get to grow this in the next few months or we leave it. We hadn’t been paid for quite a few months and we weren’t growing too fast. In September we launched a new website in which we explained our model better and gave a higher quality sensation; in october we went out in a blog and from one week to another we double billing and since then we have not stopped growing.
Your success story is very interesting from the point of view of the many entrepreneurs who try to carry out their projects every day. From your experience with Wetaca, what is the main advice you would give to someone who is in the process of launching their business idea?
Let him think about it very well, let him think if he really wants it, to think if your commitment is going to be total, to think about the worst possible situation that can happen and if you are willing to accept it. If so, put together a minimum product with which you can validate that you have clients and with what number of clients you get some unit economics acceptable.
Imagine that we take a trip back in time: What advice would you give Andrés Casal in 2014?
When you have learned something and it does not contribute anything to your company or to you that you continue doing that, Find a way to delegate. The first year we spent many months in this situation, it generated a lot of frustration and we were slower than we could have gone and than we were later.
How have you planned your marketing strategy? What kind of actions have worked best for you… and which ones worse?
During the first year and a half we grew by word of mouth, because our clients they took the tupperware from Wetaca to the office, They warmed them up in the micro and people asked them: “What is that that smells so good?” They told it and their companions tested us. We invest €0 in marketing until that moment. When we closed the first round of investment we began to test many channels and what has given us the best result is the social ads (Twitter, Instagram), although most of our clients continue to come by recommendation.
What are your customers like? What kind of orders, dishes, etc… are the most common? Are there differences by region, city…?
Our clients very diverse. At first we thought that they were only going to be people between 25-35 years old, who lived alone or with a partner, with a medium-high socioeconomic level, who lived in large cities and were heavy internet users. It is true that this is the majority customer but they also ask us for families, the elderly, students, parents whose children have left home and they no longer feel like cooking, etc.
Our clients ask an average of 6-7 tupperware per order and they really like our lasagna, our fish, which is always fresh and clean in boneless loins, and chicken in all its versions. The truth is that we have not seen significant differences between different groups.
What is your goal for this year?
We want our customers to eat better every day, take better care of them and be happy with us. This will involve release more new dishes every week, increase the variety, launch new products and show it with transparency, simplicity and honesty. This is going to imply making more content and we hope to generate an audience that trusts us and recommends us more and more for being better and better.
We have also greatly improved the consistency, which is not easy cooking people and in restaurant pots, without any industrial process.
We have a few months starting to offer our service to companies and we are doing very well, we believe that we have a lot to offer to those companies that want to take care of their workers, that they be happier, more team, more productive, healthy and with a more balanced personal-professional balance.
Where are your next steps going? Do you plan to launch anything new in the coming months?
We want to continue improving for our customers, improving their lives and their diet. We will continue to do everything in our power for them. And yes, there are news every week.
Let’s do a bit of futurology, what headline about Wetaca would you like to read in Marketing4eCommerce in a year?
“Wetaca already feeds more than 4,000 people a day”. That would imply that we have done things very well.
quick quiz
- What is the first social network you open in the day? Twitter
- iOS or Android? iOS
- App or website? Web
- In which eCommerce and how long ago did you make your last online purchase? Yesterday in
- And it was? A subscription to razors
- Last book read?
- Recommend us a fiction series I see a lot of them, the last one that I really liked is “Tunnel of Corruption”.
- What website have you seen lately that has surprised you for good? I love soccer and Abel Rojas has just opened a medium in which he leaves us his analyses; so that, Abel’s medium.
- What is your favorite thing to do that has nothing to do with digital? Eat and watch football.
- Let’s spin a magic chain: Which acquaintance of yours do you think we should interview? Why? To Efrén Álvarez, my partner, because he is a crack.
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