Gourmet’s Dalia Sultan on making the food it used to import and what comes next

Roughly 40% of what Gourmet sells comes out of its own factory, Chief Innovation Officer Dalia Sultan estimates, and the company wants that to reach 60%. She put the split on the record in the latest episode of Making It published last week, and it’s the number that explains the shelf: a grocer that opened as a single Maadi shop in 2008 selling imported meat, cheese, and olive oil now runs a manufacturing business behind it.

IN CONTEXT- Gourmet listed in February in an all-secondary offering. B Investments and four individual shareholders sold 190.5 mn shares, 47.6% of the company, raising close to EGP 1.3 bn and valuing the grocer at some EGP 2.8 bn, with the shares closing their first session at the 40% regulatory limit. B Investments has sold down since, selling another 6.5% in September at EGP 16 a share, more than double the EGP 6.90 of the IPO, taking it to 33.5%.

Manufacturing started with Greek yoghurt. Nobody made it in Egypt, and it couldn’t be imported at a sensible price (too short a shelf life, too much shipping), so it could carry a luxury price, and the margin made the case, Sultan says. Canned tomatoes took longer: Gourmet couldn’t produce them cheaper than Italian imports until recently, she says. Local mozzarella improved the same way once producers could pay more for inputs and still undercut imports, she says.

Consistency is the key, and it’s built out of two rooms. The weighing room portions exactly what a recipe needs and nothing more: for a hundred packs of hummus, the dried chickpeas, the lemons, even the salt for a hundred packs. The sorting room rejects ingredient batches before they reach the line. Once a recipe is approved, it’s locked in, and the rules carry strict consequences, with staff fired or moved to other departments for deviating, Sultan says.

Scale is the next constraint, and it’s a people problem as much as a capex one. Everyone building a food business in Egypt recruits out of Gourmet, Sultan says. That means the quality team has to be retrained as the operation grows, and capacity comes next: the company is working on more of it now, she explains, potentially a new line, potentially a new factory. The balance sheet leaves room for it: Gourmet entered the listing with EGP 274 mn in liquidity and EGP 29 mn in debt. It runs alongside the shop pipeline: two to three new stores a year on top of its 22 stores at the June count to push sales past EGP 9 bn by 2030 against EGP 2.7 bn of standalone revenue in 2025.

The one rule she would change is shelf life. Frozen products containing chicken or meat are capped at three months under the guidance of the Egyptian Organization for Standardization and Quality, against the six to 10 months she says the same items hold, while imports arriving with 12 months validity are granted six. Her reading of the logic is that the regulator does not guarantee the cold chain, which, as our cold chain reporting shows, remains the weak point in Egypt’s food logistics.

What’s next: The Gulf comes before Europe: shelves there have “many gaps,” Sultan says, and the plan is to take the full Gourmet store experience somewhere abroad with a local partner, though no location has been settled.