It was on a WhatsApp group of the school Sherine Salah and Miral Ibrahim attended in the 1980s that the two met to start one of the most trendy businesses in Cairo: cooking at one home and delivering to another.

“The idea sounded very interesting when Sherine metioned it: help women who cook well and who are not employed use their culinary skills to make extra money and help other women, and for that matter men, who do not cook either on occasional or regular basis for one reason or the other to have typical home-cooked food delivered to their houses,” Ibrahim said.

That was over six months ago. Both residents of the east Cairo neighborhood of Heliopolis, Ibrahim, an executive, and Saleh, a pathologist, met and decided to start Akla Baity (a home-cooked meal).

Saleh had already found a few cooks via Facebook to start the business she had been dreaming of.

 “I had put a small announcement on Facebook and had received lots of demands, but had to go a lengthy process of interviewing the interested cooks and inspecting their kitchens and testing the quality of their food,” Saleh said.

After a few months of interviews, Saleh had found five cooks. Each was allowed to cook whatever she liked most to cook, and it is up to the client to order from whichever cook depending on their taste.

All five of the cooks are based in Heliopolis, so she need someone with the right professional skills to do the on-the-ground follow-up, someone with the right youthful spirit, mobility and knowledge of the area to deliver the meals to the customer's door.

 “It was very clear for me right from the beginning that this business would pick up because as I had been living in Dubai for two years and [I would come] to Cairo for holidays, people were more and more counting on take-out and delivery for regular family meals as [often as] when they had people over for dinner,” Saleh said.

At the early stage of their business, the founders of Akla Baity were convinced that they would have to start small and then expand. Heliopolis was the beginning before slowly incorporating the adjacent area of Nasr City. The business later expanded to include all of Cairo and large parts of Giza, including the new neighbourhoods of Tagammoa and 6 October.

Throughout the process of expanding, the business grew to include 20 cooks and incorporated delivery companies when business picked up.

 “I think today we are up to expand further and to maybe think of starting in Alexandria next year – with cooks and delivery from the coastal city,” Saleh said.

 “I think if we could make a deal for delivery with Uber, as they do in some American states with Uber-Eat we could be expanding in Alexandria through next year and maybe even elsewhere,” she added.

Ibrahim said that she will always conduct the overall management of Akla Baity to make sure that business runs smoothly and that cooks are kept under very tight scrutiny - including random checkups to inspect the quality of kitchen hygiene and the products and ingredients used in the meals.

Akla Baity is also hoping to take their business abroad to help Egyptian women who live in Arab and even European cities use their skills and time to have a part or full-time job providing expats who wish to have typical Egyptian food at a much more reasonable price than any three-star restaurant would charge.

 “I think we have an incredible market to eye in Saudi Arabia with a very large and very diverse Egyptian community there, and with a perfect passion to use Instagram  - and of course Instagram is the perfect medium for any food service,” Saleh said.

She added that she is also eyeing Dubai, where she is living with her husband, as a potential and highly rewarding market.

It was in Dubai that Belal El-Borno and Mohamed Maghrabi started one of the very early culinary business in Cairo: Yumamia.

It was close to two years ago when El-Borno and Maghrabi had started their business in Dubai to help the Egyptian expats, “who cannot cook or who do not wish to cook go through the hassle of cooking just for themselves to find the typical food they would like to eat”.

According to El-Borno, it was a success right from the beginning, as it was clear that people get tired of having the same steak and sautéed vegetables each night at a different restaurant, all the while spending too much money on their meals.

Their joint experience of having worked for food and beverage companies helped them set up their business: deciding on menus and potions was essential to their successful start.

Their experience also alerted them to the inevitable success for their business in Cairo – as more and more people order food for a wide range of socio-economic reasons.

 “In Cairo the customers are more families than individuals with more working couples getting over-stretched with their careers,” El-Borno said.

This precisely why Yumamia started with frozen items for which orders are placed 24 hours ahead.

However as they expanded they found a need for fresh-cooked food, especially in the newer neighbourhoods around Cairo and Alexandria with young couples with demanding careers who wish to have a nice traditional Egyptian lunch brought to their houses.

Because it was clear that often enough the demand was put on a short notice, Yumamia introduced a 4-hour menu that include easier-to-cook meals from a group of their best chefs.

Today, with the help of a delivery company and an efficient IT team, Yumamia is delivering 24 hours a day.

“It is a successful business, but it is also a very demanding business because it is an incredible responsibility to keep recruiting and to the monitoring and quality control system,” El-Borno said.

El-Borno and Maghrabi are directly involved in the monitoring and follow-up processes, but after two years they have incorporated an assistant team whose job is to make sure that the cooks keep their kitchens up to the required hygiene standards and as agreed do not host any pets.

It is also, El-Borno added, demanding to decide the plan of upgrading the business.

He said that Yumamia is planning to start a dessert service after Ramadan to deliver typical Egyptian desserts. "This requires a much more complicated recruitment and sampling process because desserts are in a sense a more advanced culinary operation”.

Yumamia is also considering providing food for workplaces, which necessitates a different packaging system from the current one that is designed for dishes for no more than four people. 

It was exactly the office-delivery line with which Walid Abdel-Rahman started his Mumm business late last year.

 

Abdel-Rahman had the idea when he was living in Beirut and was depending with other single men and women to have food delivered to their office from his mother’s kitchen. 

In Cairo, with a relative food and beverage experience, this IT expert switched – or almost switched - careers. “This business is totally dependent on IT; your place your order online, it is placed to the cook online, and the delivery company is also receiving its order online.”

Having gone through the exact same process as Akla Baity and Yumamia, Mumm had in a few months after its founding expanded enough to provide an exhaustive Ramadan service that provide a diverse set of meals and typical Ramadan desserts from the kitchens of a wide range of cooks and from the central kitchens of a few charities that Abdel-Rahman chose to co-work with.

 “It is true we have expanded, but not wide enough to secure that cooked food is delivered warm to the Iftar tables of our customers; and our diverse menus of frozen food had proved to be very successful,” Abdel-Rahman said of his company's choice to only serve frozen meals during the Islamic holy month.

This, he added, has been the case with finger food–which  is very highly in demand during Ramadan-or with the more complex dishes that are ordered on weekly basis.

 “Our work with the charities helps us provide large quantities for the frozen food and it also helps us assume part of our social responsibility,” Abdel-Rahman argued.

Fard (An Individual) is one of the NGOs that Mumm has partnered with. According to Dina Samy, a Fard programme manager, it has been a rewarding operation for some 200 cooks, including Egyptians, Syrian and Sudanese refugees, who had already received the necessary training to provide and properly freeze a range of finger foods in a standardized fashion.

Fard cooks are also trained to cook simple meals for large numbers of people. “We have been doing lots of orders for individuals who wish to provide simple, easily packed, nourishing and inexpensive meals for Ramadan iftar charities,” Samy said.

The cooks of Fard, mostly women, have a regular working schedule that provides them with an adequate daily income and some meals. Their work is also financially beneficiary to the other operations of Fard that include social development and relief for some 3000 families.

Yumamia is also donating a percentage of its profit to the Food Bank. And El-Borno says that the notification on their Facebook page announcing that part of their profit would be allocated for this charity had prompted more orders.

 “I think in general Ramadan, being a really family and festive month, is a high season,” El-Borno said.

It has been so not just for the  large scale online catering service but also for smaller scale businesses as well.

Mona Badr, who is running an independent operation almost entirely through her Facebook page called Tajine Mona, said that Ramadan is the high season for orders – either for those who wish to order side dishes or those who order full dinners for large numbers.

Mona started her business a couple of years ago with the encouragement of close friends who enjoyed her dinners and especially her tajines.

At first, Badr was cooking for acquaintances and friends of friends before she set up her Facebook page.

Her success, even thought her operation is so far confined to her immediate neighbourhood in the avenues of 6 October, has secure her a cooking programme appearance on a satellite channel. This meant more business and orders for Tajine Mona – and a subsequent plan to consider further business expansion to go beyond the current 40-item menu and a larger geographic outreach.

Outreach is essential to expansion, said Abdel-Rahman. This is why he wishes to have Mumm capable of delivering simple, healthy and small meals just 60-to-90 minutes after an order.

 “I think with the growing health awareness more people would wish to replace their greasy junk meals with a comprehensive small scale and not very expensive meals,” said Abdel-Rahman. This, he acknowledged, is about upgrading the delivery and packaging service, “and this requires time and planning”.

Expansion is also about diversity, said Saleh. Akla Beity had started offering home-cooked healthy and diet food which goes from the typical steamed vegetables and grilled chicken breast to wholesome calories cautious meals that are also offered at much more reasonable prices compared to those of otherwise pricy restaurants. 

Saleh, Abdel-Rahman and El-Borno are convinced that their business will expand, not just in the interest of growing customers, but also in the interest of a growing number of talented and ambitious women and men who find a way to make a living and possibly even career from these operations.