From Poker Player to Pasta Founder || Emilias Pasta || GTG S06E06

0:00And I think with pasta, there's also a lot of misconceptions about, you know, healthy and not healthy. And I think because a lot of people have consumed mass-produced pasta that is, you know, the way I'd describe it is the nutrition gets burned in it as it's made. You know, I think that's part of the reason why there's a stigma with, oh, pasta makes you fat. It's carbs as well, isn't it? There's a big like, yeah. And I'll give you an anecdotal fact, but when you look at Italians as a nation, they eat the most carbs out of probably all the nations on earth and they're still very fit. And what we've put that down to is the fact that if you actually eat good quality pasta, it digests a lot better than if you eat pasta that's not good quality.

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2:02If you're looking for something naturally good but seriously tasty and my favourite is just our natural coconut yoghurt, I have it most mornings with granola and lots of honey. Trust me, you're going to absolutely love it. Welcome back to another episode of Getting to Grow. On this week's episode we have Andrew McLeod who is the founder of Amelia's Crafted Pasta. So welcome, Andrew. Thank you. Good to be here. Perfect. So tell me about you and what you were doing before you started your amazing pasta journey. Yeah. Yeah. So I started in a completely different space. I started Amelia's just like sort of couple of years after uni and I studied maths at university.

2:45Okay. So I was at the University year of Bath. Yeah. I did maths. I was probably destined to go into some sort of an either IT career or banking or financial or something like that. And yeah, life just turned upside down. And had you always loved pasta? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, one of the main sort of things for me is I always have to do something I love. And that's one thing that I've noticed about myself throughout my life is that you know it's not about money or other stuff it's like I have to do something that I feel I can wake up every day and just feel extremely sort of passionate about it challenged by it and also you know feel there's there's something in the future to do with it and and that it's a bit it's quite unique as well so I don't want to do something that's like a copycat or do you know what I mean something that just feels very bog standard and so yeah so So I've basically loved pasta all my life.

3:47Do you have any Italians in the family? I don't, no. Okay. So I'm not Italian, don't have any Italian roots. Although, as I'll tell you a bit more, as I'll tell you about Amelia's, I've had a lot of recognition from Italians, whether it's the Italian embassy. Wow. And other sort of areas of, you know, Italian food culture and government because of what we've done with Amelia's. So I'm sort of considered to be, I'd say, an honorary Italian these days. But I don't have any background. And so how did the kind of, so you studied maths. Yeah. Did you think, well, I'm going to go into maths. That was kind of your route.

4:26Maybe it was in the city. It was something along those lines. And how did kind of, I guess, was there sort of a light bulb moment that you had the idea for Amelia's? Yeah, I mean, there wasn't like a light bulb moment. but to sort of rewind a tiny bit I when I was 17 I started a poker business okay so I used to host poker events private games corporate games so we used to let's say go into offices you know be part of big corporate events where we teach people to play poker then they'd play a bit of poker I used to host events with with you know with private clients of their homes or in private venues um where they would they're quite high stakes games okay um how did you like were you interested in poker i loved poker i played a lot of poker as i was sort of i'd say 16 17 i used to have a fake id okay so that's how i used got into poker and there's probably a bit of maths and psychology and business yeah and then yeah so i started this poker business which was you know great during college and university um and and yes I was coming out of university I was thinking you know what's next and I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life um and so I started um sort of writing stuff down and one thing that particularly bugged me over my time at university was that you know I've eaten pastoral my life my mum even tells me these days that when I was I was very picky with what pasta shape we I used to like to eat with what sauce okay I don't know if that was sort of yeah a telling sign when I was a little kid that it's like I used to be very picky with you know let's say this shape I don't want to have it with this sauce doesn't go very well or for whatever reason and um and and yeah so that was the beginning of it and then I was mentioning I went to university and as I was there I was I was just wondering why you know we used to love pasta you know my housemates you know in halls at university and every time we went out it always felt like pasta was an afterthought on the menu okay now if you rewind 10 years and you think about you know italian restaurants let's say all the chains ask zz's you know prezzo and maybe a few others you know it always used to be an afterthought there was not something on the menu 10 years ago that was like yeah we really care about this and we're going to create splendid pasta for you.

6:49And so the more I went out at university, the more I sort of started bugging me and thinking, why firstly, it felt quite expensive for what it was, the more I researched, I found out it was all either reheated or microwaved, it wasn't fresh. And so that sort of inspired me to start taking a few journeys to Italy. And just to think, am I absolutely crazy? or could there be something in this? And so I traveled to Italy quite a few times over a couple of years, many, many trips. I did couch surfing mostly and Airbnb. So it was basically staying with whoever would accommodate me at the time. And that was my way of kind of getting under the skin of understanding more about Italian culture, pasta and pasta culture as well.

7:37And so from there, I spent a bit of time just thinking you know developing the menu um worked with various chefs anyone who would give me any insights or inputs into um you know this crazy idea when I said to people I want to create a pasta restaurant and everyone was like but that doesn't exist and I was like that's why I want to do it yeah and then they were like well everyone who's tried to do that has failed and then I was that I don't know if that was meant to scare me but that actually sort of motivated me more to to start analyzing why did the previous um you know people not not become successful or not make it work so when where was your first location uh so so we opened so about after two years of all this development research um we opened inst catherine docks okay that was in 2016 um so i'd say we were the amongst the probably the first or the second of this what has now become a huge wave of fresh pasta restaurants around London um you know and we did it just because I felt that you know good you know homely Italian pasta didn't need to be microwaved didn't need to have all these complications I thought it could be done very simply at a very um accessible price point um and so that we started in St Catherine Docks and And that was, we opened roughly at the same time that Padella opened.

9:02Okay. And so that was probably a good thing for us in hindsight. Although at the time we thought, oh, how did these guys copy us? Or, you know, what's going on here? Yeah, the Padella in Borough. Yes, yeah. But actually, you know, as time went on, I started to realize it actually was great because I was somebody who had no restaurant experience, hadn't worked a day in my life in a restaurant. And suddenly you've got guys who are, you know, have got a name and they're suddenly also starting to bring a bit of attention to pasta um and i think that you know that was a great thing for for pasta in general um because it sometimes needs somebody like that to almost help it yeah like build the category up and educate get it moving a bit definitely how did you how did you fund your first restaurant because like you know it's not expensive property and that kind of thing yeah so it's a really good question um i we started with 150k okay um that came money i'd saved up from my previous poker that's adventures um and then the vast majority of that came from a few of my former poker clients who i'd sort of been doing events for them for coming up to seven years at that stage and i just was telling them about this idea and were these quite high net worth people were they anyone famous yeah i mean i i wouldn't want to name no of course but like you were it was in that world yeah basically it was i mean you know we've got my mentor as somebody who's quite well known in the food industry and okay um and and he was one of the first people to actually sort of believe in me and and you know actually say you know what i think you're right i think pasta there's something missing here you know there's no real rational reason why you know pasta shouldn't be a bit more out there um and like i said yeah so a few of these former clients they sort of um put put just over 100k and then everyone's like you're never going to open a restaurant in london on that money and i was sort of like well i have to otherwise i'm not going to have a restaurant i've got to give the money back to them yeah so i was like maybe everyone says i can't everyone says you need 400k 500k but I was like I've got no choice and then we found this lovely little spot in St Catherine Docks um and the landlord was just in the process of trying to you know change the tenant mix and bring in some you know cool new brands um and then yeah one thing led to another and then they sort of signed us up for it yes I have worked in restaurants and um the you know the chefs are manic it's it's intense and all this stuff and I think actually it made me not want to ever have my own restaurant because it seemed incredibly chaotic I think actually for you not having having worked was probably like a total superpower yeah because I think it might have been something where you would have been like oh my gosh I'm not entering that world um yeah definitely I mean I think to put some perspective on it when we first opened I think it was about five of us and then we We hired another two or three people just just after we started getting up and running, basically.

12:06And I remember that we worked for the first month. Everybody said to me, oh, when do we come into work? And there was no rotor or anything. And I used to just say everyone comes in every day and everybody just did it and nobody questioned it until about a month later. And then people started hinting to me to say, I think we need a rotor. I think we need to start getting some structure around this. And so it was quite, yeah, it was quite ironic. And then we sort of started building from there, sort of how to run a restaurant. But originally, I think it was just quite a few of us just very passionate and thought this was really cool.

12:42Something quite new. But fun and like innovative. And you said, as you said, like you probably had all the energy for it. Like you wanted to do it. Yeah. And that makes something fly, right? Yeah. You're passionate about it. Yeah, exactly. And there was something that somebody told me. I mean, it's actually a, it's a restaurant. I don't know if you know Burger and Lobster, the group. yeah so the founder of that Misha um I when I was at university I went to one of his talks and I know and I know him um so these days I've got to know him a bit better but back then I was sort of sitting in the audience just listening and somebody asked I thought a really good question they said what makes you want to pull the trigger to do a restaurant or not do a restaurant because there's lots of opportunities there's you know hundreds of empty units there's hundreds of people would come with ideas and and his answer that he gave was that it's only the things that you cannot live without doing that you end up doing and so he's like it'll keep bugging you but then some things will go away and you'll get over it but there's some things that keep bugging you and you know it's never gonna you know let go of you and I think that's what I saw probably with Amelia's and myself afterwards I was like you know it's just like I just wasn't gonna live with that.

13:52My life was not going to happen without trying Amelia's. Yeah. And why Amelia? So Amelia, it's a double meaning to the name. So Amelia Romagna is the region in Italy. It's considered one of the most fertile regions for agriculture in Italy and in Europe. But it's also the birthplace of fresh pasta. And so for me, we want to create a name that was both, you know had some let's say historic you know origin or representation but equally felt very homely cute and so the second reason is it's an Italian girl's name and so we tried to mix the two together and that's why we came up with Amelia. I like it it's a really lovely name isn't it?

14:36Yeah I think yeah it was to make it a bit soft you know homely and hopefully to feel like it's you know you're coming into sort of nonna's yes of course yeah type feeling yeah and in the start so with your first restaurant before you kind of expanded into a few different locations what were some really big challenges that you had to overcome uh in the early days or sort of after the first restaurant or both both both um i would say to open a restaurant in london is probably to open your first restaurant is one of the most extraordinary tough things I think you could ever do I mean you're you're dealing with a property market that is extremely competitive that has you know a huge amount of local brands international brands international investors people who want to franchise um so that number one I'd say that getting a like a decent property is more than half of the job basically um and if you think about property is well nobody wants to give a nobody a property because what if they don't pay the rent in six months what if they disappear one day you know so there's huge risk for a landlord especially in central london where you know most of the properties are owned by either you know investment funds or high net worth you know people who are very experienced yeah um you know in this game um so i'd say property was probably the biggest thing that smacked me in the teeth because as i mentioned to it took us about two years from when we started thinking about it to actually getting a site open yeah so that just tells you i mean i was just literally walking high street after high street talking to any agent who would talk to me knocking on doors just just talking to shopkeepers and observing on a certain high stride but i think we'd fit in quite well here and then i'd observe come every week or twice a week and then see who's not doing well and then go in and talk to them just to see do you guys you know you're trying to get out do you want to get rid of your lease Yeah.

16:34So trying to see if we can try and create a deal that's not, you know, that's in property, we call it off market deals, basically. Because once something goes to the market, everybody knows about it. Yeah. Because all the experienced players will have agents who are sort of getting all these properties in email chains, group chats on WhatsApp. So by the time it gets to there, if you're a nobody, you're kind of already behind. Yeah. So you need to kind of be ahead of the curve in that. Yeah. So I'd say property was a huge thing that I'd say I definitely underestimated. I thought a few months we managed to convince some people and here we go with the open.

17:12I'd say probably after we managed to secure that first site, I would say, you know, getting people in the door once you're open is just it's very difficult when you're an opening. and I think everybody goes into it myself included you know you go into it you've put two years of your life you know day and night seven days a week into creating this concept and you just yourself know how much you've put into it that you believe that everybody else knows that as well and so you believe you know you you know I'd say I was a bit deluded and as are many others when you go through that and you just think that look how much love has been put into this people are going to see that yeah of course and then you open your doors and then no one pops in yeah and then you're sitting there you know and the first couple of months I remember sitting there you know there were some nights where we would serve two people you know two people for the whole whole evening really and I and but those were the days I'd say that shaped me although like at the time they were gruesome because you're literally working 7am to midnight every day um and you're like oh man it's just not good enough you know and you're like where did it go wrong yeah because also the prep right like you're dealing with fresh ingredients so at the start there must have been an element of waste because you couldn't help it because you had to you don't you know of course there are walk-ins like yes i i like to book sometimes if i know that i'm going to be in that certain area but sometimes i don't know and i might spontaneously be like oh let's go grab some pasta tonight and i wouldn't have had a booking yeah and so that was the other thing in the early days was that we had no visibility some days 20 people would be in some days 10 some days as I said two people would be in and so because at Amelia's we make everything fresh start to finish at each restaurant um that means there will be wastage I mean fortunately for me what I used to do is just bring the food home yeah give it to my mum give it to my brother yeah give it to other people so it wouldn't actually go to it's a waste for the business but like it wasn't yeah it literally yeah and so for us in our family we've always had something that we don't like throwing food away yeah so we used to just my mum used to sometimes pop in take the food because when there was a lot of it yeah she used to you know take it give it to some friends yeah um i guess the benefit of a sauce though is you can freeze them right you can but we don't okay it's really really literally everything's made correct yeah so so that was part of our ethos from day one was that you know that that was one of the things i felt was really missing in in london was i thought you had high end restaurants where you could get good quality fresh food um but when you went more to the sort of casual dining area i felt that you know a lot of the food was highly processed and you know a lot of people would go into these restaurants thinking that they're getting um you know good quality food yet it's actually the same quality as a ready meal that you're getting from the supermarket it's just somebody served it to you and somebody's washed the dishes for you yeah but in reality that there's not too much difference yeah you know between it um and yeah so going going back to your question about challenges and and the early days and I think um that that was the second thing is how do you actually get people through it but I think that also shapes you as an entrepreneur because for me when that happened is I had to dig deep in myself to figure out like like how do we get people in how do we get people excited about us and then we tried one thing we tried another thing we tried another thing and then of all those things we don't know which one worked but then a few months within a few months suddenly we were getting busier busier busier busier and and it got to a stage within a few months where we were just so busy that we couldn't cope you know and that was a great problem to have but in the one this is just with one location yes correct yeah but then if i didn't if you don't go through those you know tough times you almost don't feel like you deserve to have that great times after you can't appreciate the highs after you've had the lows and so i think that was the hard i think the hardest bit the shock that came to me and i think others as well that i've talked to is it's actually everything hits you because you've got to like you said keep the food fresh you've got to you know train your team hire your team uh you've got to essentially deliver to every ticket that comes to order so you're literally like running a live theater or a live show at the same time with this in your head you're very stressed because you know you're working very long hours you're worried about huge number of things whether it's people or team or financials or marketing or are we going to make it work or not and and i think it's a combination of all of that that hits you when you launch a restaurant at one time and i think either you sort of figure it out or you or you sink basically yeah um because there's a lot of people i know who have extremely successful restaurants but they quit because they just couldn't you know figure out how to make it the coping mechanism yeah how to cope with it how to start managing stuff um you know it's managing people situations and i would say there's no for me there was no single one thing that was tough it was more you know it's a combination as you've got a team member calling sick then another one has a family issue and needs to leave for one month and you know and then you couldn't sleep all night because you're worrying about something or you know something happens at home or with family you know and then suddenly you're juggling sort of five six things constantly at the same time whilst you're trying to deliver what looks like a refined theatrical performance to guess Yes, right.

22:45Of course. And so I think that's what I started to learn as you have to, that's a skill, sort of learning that and adapting. Absolutely. And about the team, the team stuff. So was it just you at the beginning? Yeah. So it was, I mean, I had a few people who were, you know, advising or giving, you know, giving some directional guidance. As I mentioned, my mentor who was experienced in the food industry, giving a bit of guidance. um and yeah and I had a friend who joined us um in the early days just to support us yeah you know more operationally on the ground but that that was it really in terms of support um how did you then go to thinking I want more than one location yeah so I think it happened quite organically for us um what you know the principles that I'd sort of set ourselves and we were very disciplined in how we did stuff from the early days until today was that we said that we're not going to even think about any more locations or restaurants until this one works extremely well and is so busy that we're turning lots of people away and so that was our sort of barrier for thinking about a second location because our you know our thought was if we can't fill this place up day and night what's the point in you know adding more problems to our place and so what what happened is we got to a stage where we were so busy and then what we started doing is looking at potential locations within 10-15 minutes walk of St Catherine Docks so we're looking at Liverpool Street, Old Gate, Bank you know around the city so we're just branching out a bit but not too far yeah and and the the rationale behind that was that our St Catherine Docks restaurant is really small so it's got 36 seats in total and we can't take a lot of big group booking so and if we're turning away a lot of people our rational thinking was that we would be able to redirect them to our other restaurant which is just let's say up the road um and so we thought then that would work operationally because um because what you know everybody talks about the second restaurant being the toughest um so we were thinking okay well if we have another restaurant let's say notting here or this one the other side of town what if things go wrong i can't be in two places at one time yeah And so we're also thinking, let's not branch too far because that way maybe our team members can go between sites if sites need help.

25:12We thought we'll get the overspill of all the group bookings, which should create a solid revenue base. And so that's when we opened Aldgate. We found a good site. It's about 10, 15 minutes up the road. Sort of a completely different area, but it's quite close by. We managed to get a really good deal on a site there. um and yeah and then we opened that up and again it that site was actually different because it was just busy from day one really yeah so we had the overspill because everybody knew us sort of in that vicinity and i'd say we'd probably be turning away 50 to 100 people a day so for a 30-seater restaurant that's a lot of people to turn away every day um and so that's why i said our gamble was that if it's not too far hopefully a lot of those people just say okay i really want to try Amelia sent me just and how big was the restaurant at Aldgate so Aldgate was 60 seats so it was nearly double the size yeah and so that sort of from when we opened just was very busy and sort of just got its momentum going basically quite early and so then we we sort of you know had the flip side of it was not crying about being empty the first couple of months but actually now we've got two very busy yeah restaurants how are we going to keep quality control keep the level of service you know keep building the brand yeah so then your head spins completely the other way rather than think about survival you're starting to think about brand preservation and brand growth absolutely and is this when did like competitors kind of come into the realm so you spoke about padella but i'm thinking of another one yeah um lena stores is kind of the one that comes to mind there's one down the road from me here in clapham um and when did they come into the mix and did that have the same effect that padella did which was that again it was educating customers about kind of these really fresh pasta places yeah yeah so i would say probably within about two years after the first one i think people would probably saw padella maybe some of them also came to us and saw that you know they were very successful and i think people then started copying i think the likes of you know uh banconi yeah salinosaurus was a deli way before that yeah But they started turning it, you know, taking a twist on what they were doing.

27:25Manteca. Yeah, Manteca. And then you started getting lots of people, I'd say, looking at it and saying, actually, this is quite exciting. Yeah. You know. But they only have, other than Lina stores, am I right in saying that Padella has one location? No, two locations. Oh, they have two locations. I didn't know that. Where's their other one? Yeah, in Shortage. Oh, okay. Wow. I didn't know. I thought they were like single kind of ones. No, so, and that's the interesting thing at the minute is that, you know this whole new category is in in a in an early stage of growth i mean the way i would probably describe it is you've got if you if you look at let's say how many different pizza brands there are now on on the high street you know you've got pizza pilgrims pizza express you know fata omana you know you've got like 20 great brands for p you've got rudy's and then if you look at where it was 30 years ago that's probably where we are with with pasta at the minute in in terms of restaurants and the high street yeah it's one of those dishes that you just can't go wrong with well if as in like if it's a crowd pleaser isn't it like if you don't know where to go for dinner like you can pretty much be sure that everyone's going to love a big comforting bowl of pasta yeah and that's what we try to is we try and create comfort food i mean that that's the mission basically is to create you know i'd say our tagline is we call it fresh soul warming pasta just like nonna's yeah that's that's what we have as our slogan you could say and where do you source your pasta um so i know you said it's made yeah so all our pasta is made freshly every morning in each of our restaurants so if you walk past any of our restaurants in the morning you will see a dedicated pasta station where the chefs are making the pasta and then leaving it to dry so that you'll see in every single restaurant so again our my thinking behind that was always well let's not just say that everything is natural and fresh let's show people yeah you know and so all our restaurants have fully open kitchens on one level with the seating yes so i noticed that so that's my way of saying well listen if you don't believe us you can read because a lot of brands you know talk about their marketing come to each of our sites watch it all happen you know have a see for yourself what do we do what do we not do um but that that's our sort of pledge is we will always be honest about how we make our food.

29:40And that's a very important thing for me at Amelia's is that, you know, especially in this day and age now where, you know, there's a huge sort of arguments between processed foods and the pros and cons of different types of food. I think, you know, from day one, we've tried to champion, you know, fresh food that's made on site. It doesn't have food miles. It's not made in a factory and then, you know, moved over like like many restaurants or many restaurant brands in the uk um all of our food has zero food miles it's made fresh on site so that's our sauces our desserts and our pasta our bread we get from a local bakery who supplies all our sites and our gelato we get from a very small supplier in the italian alps who make natural gelato that's the only two things that we bring in everything else is made in our restaurant that's amazing come and watch it yeah yeah and i i was very lucky to try the baker street location on monday and the pistachio pesto yeah oh that was divine the bolognese i'm i love a good bolognese like i remember going to uni and i was very lucky my um my godmother's italian yeah so i've grown up with like okay a lot of meatballs a lot of like tomato sauce has been like you know simmering for hours like none of this like rushed stuff that like you know you see and I'm going to university and as I said I've been very lucky growing up with that and a lot of people kind of like making this bolognese and like just putting like the beef in a hot pan and then like the sachet sauce and then tinned tomatoes and I'd be like what are you doing what is going on and like you know cream and carbonara absolutely not like it's but I was very lucky I had very good food growing up and and I know that but that's you know that that difference is so like i could tell straight away when i went there like your food is yeah i mean i think you've been very lucky you've had an italian i have and i think one thing that is great about italian people in general is they do have very high standards for food everything and i think that's something she takes no crap my godmother her standards are very high yeah and i think we could learn a bit from that maybe in the uk in terms of sort of having those those standards for whether it's freshness or quality um and i think it's great to see in the uk that people are more and more interested in this stuff you know and people are starting to take a greater interest in where is my food from how is it made yeah i got a little about this when i sat down in your restaurant all about your sustainability that i was reading through and i was yeah it's really nice to have had that like learn about the food i'm eating yeah Yeah, I mean, that's also part of our journey a bit is it's about sort of sourcing, you know, from suppliers that we think share similar values to us.

32:28Yeah, I think that's important. It's also, you know, because our food is very simple. If you look at, you know, even the pistachio pesto that you mentioned, it's only got about four or five ingredients in it. that's it you know and we don't use any um so we have something internally that we never use any substitute cheeses or anything so if we have vegan or vegetarian food we always make it with nuts or herbs or vegetables or yeah combinations of these items yeah and that's again part of our pledge to make sure even all our vegetarian vegan food follows the same values yeah um yeah because you know recently i think that there has been increasingly that there's you know there are um you know substitute let's say meat products that you know although it's great that you know we're we're thinking about you know eating more plants a lot of them are also very highly processed um so then you've got you know do i do a good thing in one way but do a bad thing in another way you know and so for us it's trying to hit both of those and say yes you know in our vegan vegetarian it's going to be plant-based and yes it's also not going to be processed you know and making sure that we hold ourselves um and and that's what i like to i mean amelia's everybody knows me as the person who you know always consistently talking about you know driving those standards of whether it's when we're developing new dishes or looking at new supplies you know it's making sure that all of that hits a very high standard i think as well like that's what you've built the business on so the minute you you kind of lose that value and what you go after it's not Amelia's anymore it's something else so it's very important to stay true to like the value of the business because that's what makes you guys you yeah yeah exactly and I think that's also probably what makes us very different to a lot of the other pasta brands you know a lot of our competitors I won't name them but they all use central kitchens they make their food sort of more in factory-based environments and it's more just assembling it at the restaurant um and for us that's cheating um that's not what we stand for um in you know in our values at Amelia's um and and yeah so that's what we we say to people is that that's what we believe is you know very unique about us is that um you know when you come to us you hopefully feel like you're in Nonna's living room definitely I feel very warm it was so lovely I arrived I had a nice aperol i sat and i had a gorgeous starter and it was very cozy and everyone was like there's a really nice vibe as well in the restaurant which is lovely and then yeah and i think because if you think about it when when you go to nonna's when i talked about the fully open kitchen you expect that the kitchen is kind of there it's not like hidden away there's some stuff happening it's like when nonna's there she's sort of interacting with you as she's cooking um yeah and that's kind of we're trying to sort of recreate that we're not trying to create big pasta restaurants we're trying to create small you know ones that feel you know neighborhoody independent intimate exactly warm cozy um and so we we want people to feel that that it feels like let's say just as on a side road of moderna that this is just a mom and dad um you know type restaurant and you can speak to everyone and you can see the chefs you can ask them their opinions um you know as a brand we don't actually tell our staff what to say yeah um our teams um they they will answer you know what they feel is best you know so we don't have all you have to recommend this dish or this dish because it makes more money yeah type thing we're always like we always want their authenticity we're like if people ask you questions reply honestly how you think you know what we aspire to be we're not perfect you know be honest with them absolutely and that's what we've tried to be from day one is not trying to pretend we're someone we're not we're trying to say that we're doing our best I'm sure we'll make mistakes we have made mistakes but we'll always keep those values at the front of what we're doing so I want to touch on your retail range into which I actually left up here, so I need to go and run and get it.

36:38But, here. So, how exciting. You're launching into retail. Yes. Yeah, so retail is an interesting... Oh my God, I love the packaging. So craft. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so yeah, I'll come on to that in a second. But I think just to give you a bit of a backstory into what we're thinking with this, is that, you know, we opened, as I mentioned, Aldgate's second restaurant, then we opened Canary Wharf, and then we opened Baker Street. Now, later this summer, we're going to be opening in Victoria. Oh, really? Whereabouts? That's really close to here. Yeah, just a few doors down from the Ivy. Nice. So just on Victoria Street.

37:18Okay. And so, yeah, and so over the years, basically one request that we've increasingly been having across all the sites through the hundreds of thousands of people who visit us, is that we love what you stand for as a brand and you know we love your pasta but there's also nothing to take home because some people might live an hour away from the restaurant or live in a different city right and might just be in london you know on a to see their family or friends and we've had sort of so many requests just to say listen we love what you guys stand for as a brand can you guys make products for home for us with the same values you know in terms of you know natural ingredients quality ingredients um and so that's where sort of over the last couple of years sort of then I started setting out on a different mission and almost the reason I love sort of setting this up is because it felt like I go into startup mode again it's just me yeah I'm brainstorming planning thinking this whole new sort of area I'd say this whole new startup within Amelia's um it is it's like business a little new mini business yeah it's completely completely different so we've got our sort of hundred people in the restaurant team and this you know when I was starting it was again just me just just on that little journey trying to figure it out and so yeah what we wanted to do with that is to create an at-home range of products which we're looking to grow in terms of just an initial range so that you can you know same as you know with your pasta with with sauces with you know other things relating to eating pastor at home you can experience that because you love Amelia's but you also can't come you know every day to Amelia's um and that's how we set out and to launch this and so this is our initial product launch um we launched we soft launched come the back of last year we launched into retail at the beginning of this year when you say retail where are you um so we're in we're a whole range of now speciality food farm shops um and other um you know speciality retailers and how was that finding out like the roots to market did you have to join up with wholesalers like that kind of stuff yeah direct no so so we actually we had a couple of approaches from the biggest supermarkets in the uk to say can we stock this basically or can we have conversations about this and we actually said to them is we want to wait 12 to 24 months before having any conversations And for me, what I wanted to do was to learn about our product ourselves before we put it into hundreds of stores, basically.

39:54And so the route we've taken is just one of learning and slow growth so far. And so at the minute, I think we're in about 20 plus stores. We've only been launched for three months. Hopefully going to be in about 100 plus within the next three, four, five months. And so, yeah, we're looking to grow that. But what we want to do is part of, you know, sticking to our values is also means we control our own fate. And if we were to have, let's say, a big supermarket like Sainsbury's or Tesco list us from day one, they would control 90 percent of our sales, which means they would if they wanted to change stuff would kind of be at their mercy, you know, to change it.

40:37And so for me, that was important that we don't lose our independence. Yeah. Which is why we thought we do want to maybe go in in the future, but not before we think we have a solid base and foundation. And so that we feel that's an addition to the brand, not something that we feel could choke the brand. And what about, interesting actually, I just thought about this. What about, you know, five kilo bags of pasta that you would sell to other restaurants? would that be a weird kind of conflict yeah I mean I think it may be something to think about in the future I think for now what we're really focusing just we've got you know pasta when you go out type thing you know that Italian culture experience and we want pasta at home those are really the only two main areas at the minute that we're focused on I think depending on how those go we'll see what the future could hold but at the minute you know for me I'd like to say focus just on you know the missions that we've set ourselves rather than yeah doing too many things too quickly and then being spread too thin across um across the brand yeah because going into a retailer is a big big old task gets a lot yeah you're right you are at the mercy of them because they do dictate a lot of your like you know where your product is on the shelf and and you know the kind of outlets that they put you in and the store numbers so yeah you're right it is yeah that's one thing I would say for any people who are thinking to launch their own FMCG brands or things like that is that you like we have learned so much just in this first three months of doing it ourselves and it takes a lot more time and effort to get listings when you're going at it one or two at a time but what you do is you start to learn a lot about how buyers think about stuff you learn more about your competitors you learn you know the nitty-gritty details about why certain things work why certain things don't you learn a huge amount about positioning in retail stores you know where on the shelf you know the marketing element of retail um so for us for me this is a you know a big learning curve that i want to go through before we have those conversations because i i feel that you know that partnership will be far stronger in the future with a with a bigger retailer yeah if we know what we're doing and they know what we're doing yeah whilst if we're just at their mercy they may be happy in the short term but ultimately it probably won't work out in the long term yeah you know we have to know where our product is who it's good for you know one of the key things that we've seen with our product is that especially in shops where you know the demographic is young professionals under 35 that is that's where we sell you know like crazy yeah because like you said i think when people see our pack i mean i don't know what do what do you think give me your emotions or feelings when you look at that firstly like it does feel like craft and like organic and special because of the packaging like it does feel like very it feels premium as well like i know i've picked up something that's going to be delicious pasta it does remind you of like oh invite the girls over like i want to have this with friends and like have that kind of feeling to it but also if i'm really treating myself on my own and i've had a busy day it's like that time to open this kind of pasta as well that's incredible because that's exactly everything we want to evoke is that you know what we felt is that just like with restaurants it was an afterthought is you know in that retail space for pasta um you know if i asked you just you know what brand can you relate to that you buy in the supermarket you know um for pasta oh yeah for pasta not like by labeled yeah everyone will just buy one of the either you know one of the big conglomerate or that black packaging one I don't even know what it's called it's got like black writing black black no it's got black label on it see-through pack plastic um and they do whole wheat little skinny spiralized ones don't know what you will definitely know but I just can't remember the name of it yeah and so for us I think that's why all our guests were coming to us and what they were really trying to say is that we want a brand we can relate to and we want to buy pasta that we can relate to and at the minute you know buying a Sainsbury's own label or Tesco's own label is not doing it for a lot of professionals and I think especially given you love your past I think it's almost a statement piece because we've taken so much time to illustrate them it's like a work of art and I say it's like a cheap interior feature yeah you know it's rather than having to buy a piece yeah I put this quite happily up in my um in like my kitchen versus actually decanting it and putting glass jars which i usually do whereas this looks really nice you're proud of it yeah i think it's something you can be proud of and you know as you said is when you look at that is it looks like something you and the girls would you know and that's when you look at the packs that's what we're trying to do is bring back you know you've got emilia yeah the depiction of emilia as a character and she's trying to bring the enjoyment back to pasta you know and try to say hey it doesn't have to be boring it doesn't have to be you know very mass mass produced it can be very good quality with top quality wheat top quality water you know and it doesn't have to break the bank either um pasta is just delicious like i love pasta so much it's such a staple um in my diet like i have it a lot um so i'm very excited to try this yeah and i think with pasta there's also a lot of misconceptions about you know healthy and not healthy and i think because a lot of people of consumed you know mass-produced pasta that is you know the way i'll describe it is the nutrition gets burned in it as it's made you know i think that's part of the reason why there's a stigma with oh pasta makes you fat it's carbs as well isn't it there's a big like yeah whilst what you actually and i'll give you an anecdotal fact but when you look at italians as a nation they eat the most carbs out of probably all the nations on earth and they're still very fit you know very healthy and what and what we've put that down to is the fact that if you actually good quality pasta it digests a lot better than if you eat pasta that's not good quality and so that's very very important as a difference yeah and um and and you know something also i mean i could talk forever about this but i'm trying to sort of condense a bit so if there's anything no i think the listeners might want to absolutely hear a bit more about in terms of the nutritional side tell me about the nutritional side but if yeah if you were to compare our pasta to a supermarket pasta so a supermarket pasta you know would have wheat that is most likely from brazil russia ukraine or somewhere around the world our pasta is just italian durham wheat now in italy the reason why that's so significant is in Italy there are laws and you know the Ministry of Agriculture has protocols that are put in place to govern you know the wheat that is produced in the country to ensure that you know there's no chemical pesticides there's no you know other nasties that are put in the soil and that you know the agriculture is regenerative so that you know for decades to come Italy is going to harvest wheat and so that's number one as a starting point I I mean, that's probably the most important thing in your pasta is the quality of the wheat.

47:57Now, most of the Italian brands on shelf do not source their wheat from Italy, even though it's an Italian brand. OK. So then you're starting to run into potentially issues with, you know, what pesticides, what quality of that wheat is there. The second thing, the quality of the water, the quality of the water. Which sometimes probably gets overlooked quite a lot. Yeah, but it's only two ingredients, don't forget. So those are your two, you know, main ingredients. So our water is sourced from the mountains just north of the Amalfi Coast. So that's, again, that's a huge difference, getting mountain water and getting tap water, let's say, you know, in your pasta.

48:40When it comes to the drying of pasta, that's where you've got probably the starkest difference in what affects the quality of the product. is that if you take your average supermarket pasta, that pasta is dried at very high temperatures. So what does that mean? So if you think about, if you're drying your pasta over one hour in order to dry it super quickly so that you can then package it and ship it out at a very high temperature, it's the equivalent of burning your pasta. Yeah. Because it's the equivalent of saying, well, how much nutrition is left in a food if you put it on a barbecue and wait till it all blackens out?

49:18yeah of course right and the more it gets black the less nutrition is in that product and so all your mass-produced you know pasta is is dried super fast so not naturally um at a very high temperature whilst this pasta that we have is so dried very slowly naturally keeps nutritional value correct like the good yeah yeah and it's not put in a blast yeah heater to dry it it dries naturally yeah and so and also then for your body it's so much better to digest and like it's and that is probably why the italians have such a long life expectancy because they're eating and they're also you know eating the right the right quality yeah and for me that's what these products are it's about we're going to war with supermarket pasta and say well do you want to pay an extra 50 via pack but i actually get something that is 10 times better yeah you know as quality yeah you know and and do you want to do it with a brand that relates to that you can relate to and that you know has values and principles that they stand by um and that's what we're going to war with basically yeah um because for me as i said is i don't believe that pasta is unhealthy i think it just depends on the quality and the quantities that you eat it yeah that's i struggle with the quantity i can't like pasta portions are just like when it's like you know what is it like i don't know 70 80 grams a portion and i'm like i'm definitely doubling that but i'm a very active person so i don't care like it doesn't whatever but generally like yeah i proportion size and me like don't really work very well yeah i would say enjoy your pasta because i think you know carb carbs are great for you yeah um and so the other part of the nutritional side is how long do you cook your pasta um because um everyone talks about al dente i'm sure you've heard of it but there's actually sort of scientific reason behind why al dente is good and why you shouldn't overcook your pasta and then it this also affects the nutritional side of it um but um you know from a from a pasta the reason you should try and keep your pasta you know relatively hard is that um the benefit of carbohydrates is that the carbs sugar slowly over time and the more you cook your pasta quicker it's released into your body yeah so then it makes sense so if you really overcook your pasta what happens is it's like eating a twix bar or a chocolate or something in terms of how the energy is released yeah and so people who let's say who overcook pasta that's bad quality you can start to see how that combination can create issues for digestion and other things and the other you know fascinating thing that i found with italian pasta is that when you actually have something you can chew your mouth releases saliva which helps break down you know what you're eating so in the case of pasta if you eat al dente you have to chew more which means there's more enzymes coming into that to help break it down in the digestive process so also if you're eating soft pasta you're not releasing those enzymes because you're eating it really quickly and then it sits in your so eat your pasta slower probably as well like you know enjoy it and because you're cooking it al dente you have to eat it slower because it's harder to chew and you have to digest it and eat good quality pasta if you do those three things and obviously assuming i'm assuming that someone doesn't have a gluten intolerance or something like that which and that's a completely different case but if somebody you know doesn't have that if you do those three things I guarantee you that you'll have great pasta eating experiences okay and what's next for Amelia's uh what's next um I mean we've got a lot sort of planned that we want to do um I think we'd love to grow further um you know we've got plans for growth um but for me it's very important that we grow in a way that doesn't compromise the brand and if anything what i like to say is we want to deepen the brand as we grow yeah so create more meaning create think make things better as we grow not scale and lose the quality as we scale yeah and so that's been at the center of why so far we've grown very organically you know we've grown quite fast but we've grown organically yeah um and so we'd like to continue that and we'd like to keep growing we want to you know keep spreading our love for pasta with more and more people and you know hopefully trying to make it fun again for people to enjoy pasta and not just think oh it's going to cause me a tummy ache or it's going to be difficult to digest and maybe some locations outside London at some point yeah potentially um there's potentially that that as well but I think again part of what we do is it's like we want to do stuff naturally yeah and that is not just the pasta that's like when i explained to you about why i went from you knowst catherine docks to oldgate because it was a way to do it that wouldn't compromise the brand i think we definitely think about going outside of london but i think you know there's enough space in london at the minute for for good pasta yeah and there's not much pasta even around london or you know around the uk and i think there's definitely you know people want better quality pasta yeah um and i think that's the one underlying trend that i've seen and we've all seen over the last 10 years is that you know our generation has said give me good pasta i'm not interested in the crap from supermarkets i'm not interested in your microwaved restaurant food give me proper food you know so what's your favorite pasta dish oh god um i mean that's like asking me to pick which child is my favorite well i'm asking you you must you must have a favorite um or sauce as well like what's your what's your go-to so i i would say my favorite pasta depends on my mood okay so if i'm very hungry um i think definitely a ragu um just because you want something very hearty very filling if i want just a quick light lunch I think having the pistachio pesto you mentioned is amazing because it's light it's protein filled it's you know it tastes amazing it's it's smooth I mean there's hundreds of words I could use to describe you know how it just makes you feel it just makes you feel good um so yeah I think it depends on my mood so I think um like I said very hungry ragu if I'm more like a small lunch time yeah um you know light lunch yeah probably a pesto of some sort yeah i didn't notice lasagna on your menus or yes yes so that um you're right we don't have lasagna on our menu um i think i would love to have lasagna on our menu because but we've tried to keep things super simple and we don't have ovens in our restaurants right yeah and so we we have thought about bringing ovens in and that again wouldn't compromise our values but we also want to keep it simple so that we can do what we do and do it extremely well yeah you know the more items you have on a menu the more brands have to compromise yes of course you know if you go into restaurants and you see 50 items or 40 items on the menu which some of the bigger restaurants do have you know to make that fresh every day is near impossible because if you're only selling three or four dishes of that one dish you've got to make it every five days not every day yeah or every two days you know absolutely and so i think it's also sort of thinking ahead and thinking okay if we do add stuff to our menu that then because our restaurants are not that big in size that potentially means that it's going to become less fresh yes yeah yeah oh well thank you so much for coming on getting to grow it's been fabulous catching up and i am so excited to get like my teeth into this pasta and cook it with some friends um so thank you so much great to speak thank you for giving us a chance to talk about amelia's and share our story and all head down to amelia's it is delicious yeah so we've got um as i mentioned we've got four restaurants fifth one comingst catherine docks natal bridge we've got aldgate um canary wharf baker street victoria coming soon and then for any of our retail products you can order them online or you can pick them up in our restaurants our restaurants also act as a as a retail front so to speak so if you do want to just pop in and buy some pasta for home you're more than welcome to you don't have to eat in the restaurant okay that's good to know yeah so that's another thing where you can order it online um so yeah or i'll invite you all over for a pasta yeah yeah pasta pop-up um thank you again um and have a lovely rest of your day yeah to you too