81. How Gousto is taking on the ultra-processed food industry | Timo Boldt

0:00Welcome to All About Business with me, James Reed, the podcast that covers everything about business, management, and leadership. Every episode, I sit down with different guests who bootstrap companies, masterminded investment models, or built a business empire. They're leaders in their field, and they're here to give you top insights and actionable advice so that you can apply their ideas to your own career or business venture.

0:28What does it take to leave a successful finance career and build a company in a market that doesn't yet exist? Today on All About Business, I'm joined by Timo Bolt, founder and CEO of Gusto, the recipe box company he launched in 2012 at the very beginning of the meal kit category in the UK. We'll explore how Gusto helped pioneer a new way of buying and cooking food, how technology and AI underpin its highly personalized model, and why Timo believes food companies will become preventative health businesses in the future. Well, today on All About Business, I'm really delighted to welcome Timo Bolt, who is the founder and CEO of a wonderful business called Gusto.

1:17um thank you for coming in to talk to me today timo i congratulate you on creating a business that's not only grown but um is giving people good healthy options to eat food in new and different ways at a time when so much food particularly in britain is processed so i'd like to start our conversation really by giving you an opportunity to describe what gusto does and why you started this wonderful business. Thanks for having me. It's a privilege to be here. Gusto, I founded Gusto 14 years ago and the premise was 30, 40 % of food is wasted in this country. So it's a massive CO2 problem. And then 60 % of diet here in the UK is ultra processed food.

2:07And so what you put into your body, now science is telling us has profound impact on your longevity health span how your organs function yet we're putting 60 of calories into our bodies from from UPF and so that that was kind of the initial idea to give people across the UK a healthier way to eat dinner and the way it works is you choose from 200 recipes on your app you get all the ingredients delivered and you still have to cook but we make it a bit easier healthier and more fun so there's a lot here upf ultra processed food that's sort of what we want to replace you know yes and we're the world leaders only uh with the us so we we eat in britain more processed food than anybody else apart from people in the us which has led to widespread you're saying health and other issues and just cost too and$100,$136 billion on cost into the NHS because of poor diet.

3:06Right. So poor diet is a big issue, and you're looking to address that or give people the opportunity to address that in their lifestyle choices. And to do so, you need to get an app. You said, what is the app called? How do you find it? That's the first question. Gusto on the App Store or the Android app. Very easy. And then a couple of clicks, and you get all your meals delivered. but you just click on whatever you like to eat, really. Healthy meals, quick meals, family meals, Asian meals, pizza, whatever you like, and then we deliver everything to you. And everything's delivered. So it arrives in a gusto box with directions on how to cook it.

3:47You've got a little recipe card, and then you follow eight basic steps, and after five minutes, 10 minutes, you're done, and hopefully you have a delicious meal. Well, it only takes that long to cook. a lot of the meals not all of them if you want to have the 60 minute extra of a gunza on saturday night you know be my guest we've got that is it called that no no it should it should yeah that sounds good but so you can choose how long it takes to cook yes yeah and and who are your customers you know who were the first people to sort of start thinking i want to embrace this i want to try it so i would say 35 to 55 female living outside of london it's quite um competitive from a pricing perspective we're trying to cater for the masses not the classes and so meals start at three pounds 20 um and we deliver to all of the uk highlands islands wherever you live uh three pounds 20 a head is that yes yeah per person right fresh fresh food from the farm you know x x of your five a day um good for from a protein perspective fiber perspective and so we're not we're not saying food is medicine we're saying this is a more convenient and healthy and tasty way to eat but we are over time i think becoming a preventative health care company which is not obvious today no i can see how that might happen so so you started off female customers 35 to 55 would would they be typically cooking several meals i mean would they be ordering for four or six people i mean yeah so so the core customers buying for four or five people so it's like a family unit family unit and they normally buy four recipes most customers get it delivered on which is a a logistical nightmare because the concentration is so vast but most people want to have it delivered on a sunday or monday to cook during the week everyone is competitively busy running after toddlers and having chores and so they just want to have a little bit of a simpler life and gusto is providing convenience but without the compromise so you're not compromising on price health uh co2 emissions these things i like that expression convenience without the compromise so you don't have to have all the toxins because yeah you can get a pizza delivered faster than us.

6:15That's more convenient than Gusto, but you're compromising on a couple of levels there. Yeah, I can see that. So what gave you the idea to start this? I mean, you were working in banking, weren't you? Investment banking? I was an investment banker. I stumbled into banking in 2008. I studied finance and my professor said, look, you like numbers have you heard of m &a and banking i i didn't i had no clue your professor where was this i studied uh in the u.s and germany right so you're from berlin originally i am from berlin yes the german accent has never gone away i've lived here for 18 years yeah speak english to my kids surprisingly but um and so my professor really pushed me and he said look um goldman sachs is recruiting you should you should go i had no idea what m &a is i mean completely embarrassing experience didn't get so you worked in goldman fact no i didn't so i didn't even get an internship i didn't know what the guys were talking about like whack and you know all these like that's weird yeah and and then i did look into it more and then i i studied up on it and i got a job offered at rothschild i was briefly in new york and frankfurt rothschilds is pretty high high ranked.

7:33Yeah, it was good. Somebody said, look, would you like a job in London? And I had never been to London. The day after my final exam, I was on a plane to London and it took me some time to culturally get used to the language. My first, just one quick memory, but the first offside, the Rothschild kind of introduction offside, it said casual. And so, you know, picture 30 people from Oxbridge wearing cufflinks and a jacket and me in a t-shirt because I didn't understand what casual means I think you did and they didn't but and look I gained an analytical toolbox and I really enjoyed kind of meeting smart people but then I left after two and a half years to join a hedge fund um and again I thought you know banking is not for me I want to be and more entrepreneurial I want to be on the buy side.

8:29And again, to be honest, it took me a long time to learn, but it just wasn't for me. I didn't enjoy finance, and I wanted to. But that's a journey that many people go on early in their career, is trying things and then finding something that is for them. You need serendipity. Yeah. So you came here from a new arrival to London. You said, you know, the language, the culture. What about the food? I mean, is that part of what motivated you to do this? or am I being unfair? Not initially, if I'm being brutally blunt. No, but I mean, in fairness, London has such amazing variety. It does. Wow. And, you know, the types of restaurants, the quality, the standards, even the produce you can get.

9:14And so over time, I fell in love with London and the food scene and the restaurants and the choice and the wider UK. But it wasn't an initial love affair. Yeah. So how did this idea sort of develop in your mind from working in a hedge fund? So before I started working, I did my senior high school in the US. And my godparents are hardcore entrepreneurs who have built dozens of companies, small companies, ice cream places, a restaurant, an organic supermarket, a vineyard, these types of businesses. These are people you're living with. so they found a host family for me oh this was post 9 11 in 2001 host families didn't want to take german students in right my my godmother uh hustled and she she convinced her neighbors to take in this german kid who couldn't speak english right and i got to play american football and i firsthand saw my godparents kind of have this amazing lifestyle and have all these businesses And I kind of felt like, you know, at age 16, I want to do what they are doing versus my dad, who was kind of slaving away and working really long hours.

10:24Well, he worked for a corporation in Germany. So you sort of thought, oh, this entrepreneurial thing looks quite good. I should get into this. They were sort of multiple entrepreneurs. I mean, they had endless businesses. They had a pain practice. He was a doctor. She was a dentist. So they had a dentist practice. this. And then these kind of businesses created enough income to start a lot of other businesses on top. And you know, most of them failed, they've never raised money, they don't have boards. They never made run raised money suggests that overall, they've been very successful. Overall, they have been very successful.

11:02Did you know that there are nearly 1 million 18 to 24 year olds who are currently not in education, employment or training in the UK? This is simply not good enough and i want to do something about it that's why reed is launching a new initiative giving 20 000 pounds to young entrepreneurs to help them grow their small business visit reed.com forward slash entrepreneurs to find out more we want to support and encourage the next generation of entrepreneurs so that was a sort of early eye-opener for you yeah and it pushed me you you know, provenance, food, purpose, is this good for the planet? Let's walk the vineyard.

11:46This is how we do kind of the farming. And it just really kind of impressed me. And so I always dreamed about having a business myself one day in the food space. And then I joined finance, and they kept on pushing, Timo, why are you in finance? Quit your job. Your friends in California were saying, hang on a minute, what's going on, Timo? You can always get a job again. So if you quit your job, no kits, no mortgage, there's no risk. And if you fail, well, you learned how to cook. So just get on with it. What you just said really resonated with me. You can always get a job again. And it's so true.

12:20I mean, people think, oh, you know, this is a huge risk. But is it really? It's just having a go at something else. Yeah. So you've sort of reflected. So you were sitting in an office working for a hedge fund, thinking about food. Working 100 hours, dreaming about food and being an entrepreneur. And one day, what happened? You decided to take the plunge? I decided to take the plunge. I worked 100 hours. I couldn't even write a business plan. But I had the strong calling to do something that's more purposeful, and that is related to food. And so I started dreaming about how can you make diet better across the UK?

12:57How can you give customers better, more fun, kind of ways to cook dinner? And the most important, the high high stakes kind of meal of the day how can you make that better and this then morphed into the gusto idea over time but i just at some point i just knew i need to quit my job to pursue this and you did this on your own the gusto idea i had a co-founder for three years okay so for the last 11 years i've been by myself and initially i had a co-founder so when you started could you describe the scene i mean where were you what were you doing how did it work so i moved back into student accommodation my girlfriend back then did her phd in oxford university and so we we moved into the tiniest tiniest place in oxford i took the 7 a.m train to get to london and we rented this this tiny space which served as a test kitchen slash office slash everything where was that i was near shepherd's bush but not where you have a tube station a train station or even a bus so you had to walk quite long to an industrial complex you had a shell gas station and a tesco a tiny tesco convenience store so it was fairly basic and downstairs my co-founder or i would cook and upstairs one of us would work and you know the fumes and smell so you were doing you were cooking the meals and preparing the food i developing it up and delivering it like I developed the first kind of 40, 50 Gusta recipes.

14:25Did you? They're all blacklisted now, I think. I tell the team for supply chain reasons, but I mean, in fairness, the chefs are much better today. So that's the reason. Oh, that's a shame. You should have one signature recipe. I think I deserve one. I think so. I think you should go back there and get one back in. So you started doing this. So how did you get your first order? How did you tell people this was a possibility? I'm purely hustling. You know, we went to the train station, handed out flyers, begged people to try. And every weekend I would go to food festivals with a pestle and mortar, making kind of samples of how amazing pesto would taste.

15:07And doing this for 10 hours and trying to chat up people and say, would you like to try this? Here's a flyer. This is amazing. We change your life. But yeah, I mean, initially we might have had two customers, five customers, seven customers. And you would take the boxes to the person? And then I would hand deliver to these customers in Oxford and London. So I would take these boxes on the train to Oxford back home and then hand deliver in Oxford. The economics of that don't sound great. No, and I couldn't afford a car. So I mean, it was completely unscalable. Okay. So how did you solve that conundrum?

15:43How did you scale up from that to what is obvious? I mean, just describe how big it is now. How many people work for this company now? Today, we've got 1 ,600, 700 people. 1 ,700 people delivering. How many meals would you deliver a day or a week? We did 80 million meals in 2025. 80 million meals. 80 million meals. So that's a long way from you on your own in Shepherd's Bush with your partner. I feel very privileged today, yeah. So, I mean, that's a brilliant achievement. but how did you do it? I mean, what's the story here? I mean, we really, really wanted to succeed. And I think we had this boundless curiosity, and we just start naively, we will make this work, no matter what.

16:28But we weren't fixated on this price point or these types of recipes. We changed everything based on the conversations we had. So we went to the tube station, talked to people, took into account their feedback, changed the website overnight, changed small, tweaked everything. So you were learning all the time. All the time, yeah. And it's interesting to me, you were talking to customers all the time because you were delivering the food at the tube station. I gave them my phone number and they would literally call until 1am. Would they? Not after 1am, how nice of them. So you were very much in touch with your market.

17:04Yeah. Are you still able to do that? To a lesser extent, I still try to. I still talk to customers all the time. Some of these early customers, I gave one symbolic share in Gusto, and I framed it nicely. I went to their house, and I said, thank you. You believed in us. We now raise some money, and the company is kind of going somewhere. Please be a shareholder, and I want to say thank you. And so I stayed in touch with these early customers, and some are still buying today, and we're on year 14 now. right and so i i try to connect with customers as much as i can so you said then subsequently you raised some money we we did manage to raise what did you do what was the family and friends initially right i i was naive i didn't know what a vc fund is or what angel investors are i didn't know which people and so we we hustled kind of in the network of the few people we knew yeah and And then I kind of, over time, started to get to know angel investors.

18:05And I learned what a VC fund is. I went onto Dragon's Den. That was fantastic from a PR perspective. Did they invest in you? They didn't invest. They made two offers on the show. It's not their mistake, eh? Yes. They didn't. They made two offers on the show. They didn't miss out. But it was amazing. You're quite glad on that. Yeah. You kept the shares, I guess. And so we tried everything. We just sent random people. if I had known you back then I would have sent you five postcards I'm very sad you didn't so you so you went out to your network but this is good advice for people who I mean who does know VCs and angel investors actually I mean you're not alone are you so if you want to grow a business and I challenge my advice is very helpful what you know what you did is what worked for you anyway yeah and I challenged myself you know I I the most influential person I knew from Rothschild for example was the managing director who was kind of near me and i worked for him but then i thought why why not message the chair of rothschild yeah yeah well what could go wrong yeah um and so i i sent these 100 christmas cards to 100 people totally out of my reach and i would say five responded and so the chair of rothschild for example did respond and said yeah sure i mentor you and i'll buy you a coffee and you know and he then invested later and we're still so was that what was that what your request was would you mentor me on a christmas card yeah what could go wrong is what you just said i mean basically nothing i mean they're just the answer just no or yes yeah you know it costs you a hundred pounds and 95 people have not responded and so tony blair if you're listening um tony you missed a trick here it's not too late i'm sure he's a regular listener of our podcast but um yeah that's that's very interesting but so you had five respond i think sending people things in the post sounds outdated to a lot of a lot of young people but it actually works because you don't get that i mean i've just been away for a week came back there were five envelopes on my desk i opened and looked at every one of them i haven't looked at my email yet yeah so you know it's interesting yeah it's very powerful so that worked for you so So, looking at the scene now, you've expressed concern that the sort of food system in Britain is, I think you've used the word broken.

20:31What do you think needs to happen? Because there are a lot of concerns around people eating too much processed food and not being able to cook healthy food. You're obviously presenting an option, but what else needs to happen? i mean since 1990 we've seen a fourfold increase in obesity levels across the world and even more in the uk and then we talked about ultra processed food how the uk is leading in bad nutrition pretty much next to the us and you've got 135 billion on cost for the nhs due to bad nutrition and now science is clearly showing the evidence between what you put into your body and your longevity and you can literally take 10 years of your life expectancy off if you if you kind of continuously eat bad food you've talked about the bliss point i read this which is a combination of salt sugar and fat which is yeah the sort of tempting stuff that um this is this is the hook they get get us on is it this is the hook people manufacture the bliss point to get you addicted and to massively overeat beyond the point where you should stop and in addition the food we eat is full of additives like if you go to the local supermarket and you look at stuff oh my god it's full of stuff that that it shouldn't have in there yeah and it's fundamentally bad for you and the additives are put there for what reason to extend shelf life to make it tastier artificially you know to to be able to claim no sugar but then of course lots of additives and stuff and ultimately these things are really cheap salt is cheap sugar is cheap additives chemicals are cheap and so if you want to have a juicy margin as a food manufacturer right put more of this addictive stuff in yeah and if you don't have to pay for the consequence the consequence then is the NHS is on its knees.

22:31But your profits are going up. And so you have this moral dilemma and no business in the world will ever then decide, okay, we walk away from this. This is bad for humans. People get addicted to the profits. And so I'm not huge on regulation, but here you really clearly have to regulate. Well, people get addicted to the product and the profits. And I mean, I'm thinking about tobacco when you were describing, which is clearly a poisonous product that has been very highly taxed and its marketing very much curtailed in my lifetime. You know, it was very glamorous when the Marlborough Cowboy and stuff when I was young.

23:07And now you look at a packet of cigarettes, if you're able to see one, it's grotesque. This level of attention has not been applied to the type of poisoning you're describing in the food category. And it seems that when people do say, oh, we're going to put a tax on salt, you know there's this huge outcry from the press you know nanny state and but if if the state has to pick up the costs in terms of keeping people alive in the nhs or looking after their health that can't be a reasonable state of affairs can it i mean no and we need to move away from the notion that you just need a better mindset and better habits because ultimately these additives are really strong and they make you addicted.

23:58And so, yeah, I mean, I see it in any state argument everywhere, but ultimately it's just a grossly unfair system and to make it more fair and to protect the vulnerable. If you are in the bottom 20 % of income, 80 % of your calories are ultra-processed food because it's the cheapest food. And for kids, it's 90 % of calories are ultra-processed food in these poor demographics because it's the cheapest food. And so you have to just change that. I mean, that is terrible. And you're saying this takes 10 years off your life expectancy from recent scientific research. Yeah. So we're feeding the most vulnerable, the worst food.

24:37Yeah. And willingly and knowingly doing that. And we have so much scientific evidence now that's kind of showing the link between bad nutrition and health outcomes that now really is the time to kind of do something and intervene. but what i've also observed is a lot of these processed foods you don't have to cook even you know you just get them eat them straight away or warm them up or put them in a microwave so they've made everything very easy yeah and cheap and especially in the uk we're made to believe that convenience comes with a compromise and what we're trying to say is no no no you can have it all you don't have to compromise but somehow we've been conditioned to believe that we're all competitively busy and we have to sacrifice quality in order for for us to gain some time right but that's not the case that's absolutely not you can have it all you can have it all well why not but i am i am sort of interested in how to address that the the less well-off demographic where children are eating that percentage of processed food how how could society help that group of people better?

25:49Because, I mean, your price point is not high, but some people in that category might struggle to pay for your meals on a regular basis, clearly. How can you make good food more affordable and more attractive to the poorest people in the community? You probably have to start with school meals, university meals, NHS meals. Can you start by making these healthy as a starting point? And then how do you tax UPF companies and products so that you can subsidize kind of the better stuff yeah so there's huge taxes placed on sort of energy companies maybe there should be yeah huge taxes on some of these other companies that we say yeah and then the money's recycled to make absolutely more affordable absolutely and you gotta you gotta hold these supermarkets and manufacturers to account reporting has to be more transparent labeling has to be more transparent so we really understand what companies are doing.

26:47Timo, you've described the business and the service and the products you offer. I mean, it's quite complex, it seems. What are your key challenges? What are the challenges you face at Gusto today? I mean, we have huge opportunities, but from a challenges perspective, look, cost of living crisis, UK economy is not fantastic, mortgage rates are not going you know down actually going up at the moment the iran war is causing energy spikes and so you know we we really care about how our customers are feeling and how they're doing and consumer confidence is is fairly grim at the moment and so since the beginning of the the cost of living crisis we've kept inflation to 60 percent of what supermarkets pushed into customers and so in relative terms gusto has become more attractive to customers but it is our job and obligation to protect these families from price rises and so cost and price is really really important to us and i know you like to source sort of locally produced food i mean what's the situation in farming i mean we hear that that's quite challenged too what's the situation that you're experiencing yeah i mean farming farming is challenged ultimately people are addicted to these chemicals and they eat ultra processed food and not the food from the farm they should be eating and so as as a country we got a tax on this side and we got to subsidize on this side and we gotta we gotta support farmers more so who's being subsidized of processed food really and there's farmers being taxed i mean both are taxed and but yeah i mean you have to You feel the balance isn't right.

28:32Yeah, the balance is wrong. Right. If you want to eat more healthily in the UK, you have to help these farmers. We have amazing farms in the UK. We do. And amazing farmers. Yeah. So we should certainly, I certainly support what you just said. There's an app I was told about that you pointed at the barcodes on things, and it'll tell you whether it's healthy or not. It's quite surprising what comes up. I mean, some things that look quite healthy, you know, Like it's a big red circle and things that maybe don't are okay. So that level of information is not widely available either, is it? No. And often, you know, you buy, I don't know, a garlic salt.

29:11And then suddenly you look at it and there's sugar added in it. Why do you need sugar and garlic salt? Yeah. And so it's quite surprising once you start studying these labels. Yeah. Years and years ago, my French friend was complaining about British mayonnaise having sugar in it. I think he was onto something. Yeah. He was horrified. so but i promise you they did the study in their lab and they realized the retention and frequency shopping frequency is better if they secretly add sugar and they kept on raising it because sugar is so cheap but people got more addicted and more addictive than cocaine apparently yeah so that's why they do that yeah i mean this doesn't reflect well on business i mean i mean i'm an advocate for business i'd like to think a champion of entrepreneurs but business isn't behaving well here, is it?

29:58No, and look, I get it, the short-term pressure and profit margins, and ultimately that's become the God to pray to. But here it has a really, really, really nasty negative consequence. So, I mean, it's not as bad as the opioid scandal in America, but there's an aspect of that in this, you know, putting things in products that hook people and keep them coming back for more that isn't good for them that it might shock many people i think but yeah you were obviously onto that a long time ago i mean you said that it was since 1990 obesity is quadrupled so this was obviously something you were aware of a long time ago and Chris and you started trying to create an answer you know Chris packages have become bigger and bigger and bigger and we're just addicted to these foods yeah i was thinking of crisps when i was thinking of the bliss point i might stop against salt and vinegar i mean yeah that's the trouble though it's got all those ingredients in isn't it for me it's binary right once i stop that crisp back i'll eat it all and then i want another one yeah and so it's easier in the first place to not start because i i can't control it no nor can i so that's that's good advice so you've started this this um business with this objective but you you've said you're moving it or there's a sense that you might be moving into preventative health i mean is that a strategy or is that an observation or how do you see that shaping up going forwards so so it is part of the strategy but you got to be really careful if you just tell people this is super healthy food you lose your mainstream appeal people still want to have a burger and they still want to have sausages and they still want to indulge and so we're not we're not here to take away all the fun we still want to make the meals as tasty as possible but we want to do it in a way that's good for you and so over time we're leveraging the personalization ability to make the meals better and better and better and so for example we just have taken you know x percent of salt out of the menu but we've done it in a way that kind of retention didn't go down frequency didn't go down and so you as a customer don't even know but we're making the menu better and better and better right and i understand you're using ai to help customize menus and that every menu is potentially different how are you doing that yeah so you and i should never see the same menu we should see very personalized and customizable menus and so for the last 10 plus years we've built 17 ai products that power the factories that decide what you and i should see based on what we've ordered the last couple of weeks we've been doing that for 10 years yeah i mean employee number eight was a phd in machine learning right so you're well ahead of the curve and he he was amazing he cut forecasting waste and saved us lots of money and so we got we got addicted to data science early on luckily right and so we we asked him what else can you do and so he moved from forecasting to order routing optimization where how does the order travel through the factory and how do we do we put tomatoes on the first station in the factory the last one, all 150 stations.

33:23I mean, no human can ever kind of calculate these things. And every time he updated the algorithm, magically our labor costs went down. Right. And you still need people who have 50 years of factory experience. And you also need these 20-year-old kids with PhDs in machine learning. And together, they did magical stuff. And so we got quite addicted to the power of data science early on. Well, it reassures me you still employ 1 ,700 people in this environment, because that's what success can bring. But you got addicted to a data science. So how does it work now? Why would my menu be different to yours?

33:59Because of what I've eaten in the past or what I look at? Or how does it work? Yeah, I mean, exactly. It takes into account what you've chosen in the last couple of weeks. It looks at customers that have chosen similar recipes to you but have then ordered X, Y, Z. And so it starts to recommend the same. It looks at the stuff you browse. How much time are you spending on these? So it takes all these cues into account and then kind of creates a personalized menu. And 80 % of chosen recipes are now from that AI-driven menu. 80%. So you mentioned you had a factory. And a few moments ago, you were talking about this little workshop in Shepherd's Bush.

34:41Where's your factory now? And how does it work? We've got a massive factory in Warrington. and then we've got one in Lincolnshire. So the bread basket of the UK, flat land, potatoes everywhere. Why did you choose those locations? They already have a lot of manufacturing capabilities, factories, a lot of people who want to work in food manufacturing. In Warrington and Lincolnshire. In Lincolnshire, yeah. So is that where all the meals are assembled? Do they perform different functions, those factories, Lincolnshire and Warrington? Slightly different. slightly different degree of automation and data science but i mean broadly the same and then you have a huge logistics or do you sec or do you well we it's all we do that yourself no no we piggyback on the existing careers so yodel dpd right royal mail they deliver for us and the box is compartmentalized and there's a cool cool box a chilled kind of compartment in there so the food It stays fresh for 36 hours.

35:44You just leave it out the door. We obviously temperature probe test all the time. So those companies are pitching for your business, basically. So the Royal Mail, DPD. And the main reason is we initially tried to, I mean, hand deliver myself, but you put so many more CO2 emissions on the street. Whereas if you can piggyback on the existing supply chain and they send an Amazon delivery to the highlands, why not take the Guster box in the same van? So just, yeah, it was a lot more economic. and a lot better for the environment. And does your data analyst look at all those options as well? Yeah. So I imagine that's getting much more efficient with AI because the AI can see all the possibilities.

36:23So that reduces cost for you. Yeah, and also error rate. So the AI takes into account this DPD hub or Yodel or whatever. I don't want to sing loud one. But this hub does perform amazingly well. We must give them more volume. This one, not so much. What's going on here? And then I can, you know, my team calls them and finds out what's going on. Is it a people issue? Is it a lack of training issue? Do you know that they've got a problem before they do? Often, yes, yeah. Because we get the data in real time. Yeah, exactly. So that's quite valuable that they've got that good relationship with you.

37:01So how do you see this growing? How are you going to expand? Because it sounds to me like an entirely positive thing that people can order healthy food quickly and efficiently through gusto. So how are you going to make more people aware of it? So, I mean, the two things that really resonate are convenience and then health. And so we'll push the proposition quite hard into these directions and offer people even faster choices. And I think we're morphing from being a meal kit subscription business to a much more flexible dinner time solution business where you can have a lot of healthy options in five minutes, three minutes, 10 minutes, 60 minutes.

37:40And so you get a lot more empowerment as a customer. So we're making the product proposition a lot more flexible. And then look, we launched Ireland as our first international market last year. It's early days. We've only been trading for a year. Have you got a factory there as well? We have a small factory. Where is it? In Dublin, outskirts of Dublin. So in Ireland as well. Yes. The same app and everything. I mean, look, similar to the Brits, the Irish are so proud of their produce, rightfully. So you want to use local produce. But they are completely time poor, just like us in the UK. And so there's a lot of commonality, actually.

38:18Yeah. And it's a smaller population, though, with some places quite remote. Yes. So the logistics might be different. Yes, yeah, very different. But it's a nice test bed for us, you know, to explore Ireland. So then you're thinking maybe going to other geographies after that. Yes. I mean, there's no rush. We really, really want to create value for our customers here in the UK and in Ireland, but eventually go further. Okay, well, I think that's a good ambition. What about the sort of packaging aspects? I mean, because you're obviously very focused on sustainability and the purpose of the business being a positive one.

38:59How do you manage the packaging so you use materials that are sustainable? Are you able to do that? Because I imagine food needs to be kept fresh. And there are some complexities around that. There are complexities. So the aim is to shift from today 80 % of packaging being recyclable, reusable, compostable to 100%. By the end of this year, we may or may not manage to achieve it. That soon? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're pushing very hard on this. And so there was a Bristol University study in 2023 that concluded every time you eat Gusto, you save 23 % of CO2 emissions versus the equivalent supermarket shop.