Previously, we shared how we’re changing the Vancouver Startup Week events calendar this year. To help our attendees discover the events they want to participate in, we’re organizing our events calendar into five tracks: fundraising, founders, growth, technology and networking.
In addition to organizing our event calendar under these themes, we wanted to share insights from some of Vancouver’s top experts to help our fantastic community learn more about how to fundraise and become an effective investor, how to start their own companies, how to grow and market their companies, what they should do when developing new technology and how networking can help them build their own communities.
In Part Three, we speak to Mealshare co-founder Andrew Hall about how Mealshare started, how they’ve grown as a company and the processes they’ve established to make their business model succeed in six cities and counting since 2013.
Where did the idea for Mealshare come from?
Mealshare was co-founded by my cousin Jeremy and I. As children during family dinners, our grandmother would tell us to eat our vegetables because there were starving children in Africa. Being children, the concept didn’t make sense to us. But it was this concept that would ultimately serve as the foundation for Mealshare.
After university and working in the private sector, we both wanted more meaning out of our careers and we wanted to incorporate our values. Being inspired by other companies who were running buy-one-get-one concepts, we wondered how we could apply that to food. We partnered with restaurants to develop a buy-one-get-one program, placing our logo on certain menu items — which means every time a Mealshare item was purchased, a youth in need also received a meal.
Mealshare has been steadily expanding since 2013. How do you decide which city/region/market to expand to?
When Mealshare launched, the program was introduced in Victoria, as I was living there at the time, as well as Edmonton, Jeremy’s residence, and Calgary, our hometown. We also expanded to Vancouver because that’s where I and Derek Juno (Mealshare’s director of business development and sales) ended up moving to. So the first four cities were chosen, purely based on where we lived. We then looked into more Canadian expansion, attempting to launch remotely in Toronto before figuring out our business model.
What were the 3 steps you took to expand the company? Were there particular tools or resources you used?
For our business model to work, we needed community leaders in each one of the cities we launched in to engage with partner restaurants, get them excited about the program and allow them to see the impact they are having on the community. In order to fund the community leader positions, we needed funding through restaurants. That meant we needed cities with about 1 million+ in population and enough restaurants to sustain the model and allow it to work in any given city. After Toronto, we launched in Ottawa, Montreal and Hamilton, respectively.
While we do have some ideas on how to move into smaller Canadian markets that we’ll be working on in the next couple of years, we decided to look at US expansion first. Across the border, they have approximately 100+ cities with over 1 million in population and an even greater need when it comes to reducing youth hunger.
As Mealshare has been expanding, how has the business development and growth process changed? Do you have new tactics/strategies and sales techniques?
We spent the first three years operating in Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver to really understand and perfect the business model. We also took time after expanding to Toronto to work on ironing out any kinks and applying the lessons we learned before expanding further. When it came to our expansions, we had a lot of trial and error. We started out by having Derek fly out to Toronto more than once to manage expansion into that city remotely, which didn’t work. We tried turning to funding through charities and grants, which was unreliable and cumbersome.
Through trial and error, we’ve now developed a process of fundraising through grants, philanthropists or corporate donors whenever we expand to a new city. We also find a charity partner, hire a community leader and develop an expansion committee, who help us manage each city’s program on the ground. We’ve systemized and written down the process, which makes it that much easier to onboard new team members.
We now have a structured process where they email restaurants first and call them before moving to face-to-face meetings. We’ve systemized the process so that any new onboarding community leader can go through the process and have a successful first launch, even without previously having restaurant contacts. If anything, through expansion, we’ve learned the importance of writing our processes down, in order to streamline training and expansion later.
How have you seen Mealshare’s charity partners grow since 2013? Have these relationships changed how you approach/retain new charity partners?
We have charity partners that have worked with us for 5 years, others are still fairly new. We support before school breakfast programs, lunch and after school programs as well as spring and summer programs and teen shelters. Mealshare has been able to completely fund the meal budgets for one of our downtown Vancouver charity partners through funding we receive from our restaurant partners, which is when we look for new charity partners. We look to have meaningful impacts on each charity partner, which is why we only have a select few in each city we’ve expanded to. Many charities approach Mealshare for partnerships, but we will only sign new charity partners when we expand into a new city or when we have completed meal funding for a charity partner. We keep a list of charities to work with when we’re ready for more partners.
How has media attention and public support played a role in Mealshare’s continued growth? Are there plans to incorporate more sponsorship and public support in Mealshare events such as Tonight for Tomorrow?
For our flagship annual fundraiser, Tonight for Tomorrow, we launch in select cities every year with restaurant partners. Diners are encouraged to dine on Mealshare items at the partner restaurants and each restaurant will donate half the proceeds from the sale of those items to help Mealshare continue to grow.
We have some expansion plans for a fall fundraiser as well that we’re currently working on. But the media has been a valuable partner in every single city Mealshare has expanded into. Their support has made such a big difference in helping Mealshare continuing to grow and hopefully become a household name.