How Manon van Essen scaled up her homemade vegan pizza into the Magioni brand

• What was the biggest push for Manon to become an entrepreneur?
• How did Manon find customer validation for Magioni pizzas?
• How did she find her first investors for Magioni?
  

We’ve summarised the highlights of our talk with Manon in this article.

00:52

I think one of my biggest decisions was moving to Amsterdam, and getting into a group of very entrepreneurial people. We worked together in a startup-like building, so I learned a lot from their experience, because I come from a small town, therefore I didn’t know about all the possibilities until I came to Amsterdam. Moving to the capital really helped me to gain the connections I needed to found my company as well as understand that I should aim globally with whatever business I initiate, instead of narrowing down my focus to the Netherlands only.

02:17

I’ve always wanted to be in tech. I liked the scalability of the environment, so I decided to shift my entrepreneurial focus into tech. Back when I was still studying, companies that made it to the Deloitte Fast 50 list were all working on a digital product. Large companies, such as Hallmark were doing digital greeting cards, or enabling you to upload a photo album online. So my first thought was - ‘Can I create something that would add to this?’. As a result, my idea was to create a software that would get your personal handwriting and transform it into a real-time font. I eventually sold this solution after a few years, and this is how I started my journey. 

For my second venture, I wanted to go for a bigger impact and serve the needs of people from various socio-economic levels. This is why I shifted to the food industry - I focused my next venture on creating affordable salads for everyone. It was quite a shift for myself, since I moved from creating online solutions to getting a 9m2 space in Foodhallen and doing everything by myself - from organising the space, to making, and selling the salads. So it wasn’t a great experience, which is why I decided to sell my shares to my co-founder and get out of the business.

This way, I had the experience from my tech company that showed that if you build a good solution, the business becomes very scalable. Also, from my salad brand I learned that I’m really passionate about creating something that people from different backgrounds can enjoy. Pizza is one of those universal dishes that people love across the globe. Plus, I saw that cauliflower pizza bases become trendy among home cooks in the US. This is how I got to the idea of founding a guilt-free pizza brand that became Magioni.

11:35

I just decided - ‘Okay, I’m going to bake 10 pizza recipes in my kitchen every day’. In a few weeks, I had something that I could call pizza. Though the first version looked hideous, I thought to myself that I could sell it one day - I really believed in this concept. Then I looked around in my neighborhood and went in to ask a local pizzeria if I could help them create a healthier pizza menu next to their normal pizza menu. And so, I started testing what works and what doesn’t by directly asking customers for feedback. This was a very important moment for the brand because I could test my pizza among 3000 people before committing to that one recipe. Plus, I could use this result when reaching out to a supermarket to be featured on their shelves. Essentially, that was the proof of concept for Magioni.

13:40

Once I got my proof-of-concept and tweaked the recipe to what it is today, I quit working for the pizzeria and started working on my business plan. I had some tech connections from my previous businesses, so I sent them out an email with the note that I am hiring angel investors. I used the word ‘hiring’ instead of ‘seeking for’ on purpose, and luckily got three investors who wanted to invest in the company. One of them was Abel Slippens, the founder of Sligro Food Group, who had a lot of experience in the field and also on a personal level I had a lot to learn from him. So, this way, I decided to choose him as Magioni’s investor. And at that point, I was in talks with Albert Heijn about getting Magioni in their supermarkets.  

There is a funny story, when it comes to arranging the production side. My uncle has a professional services company, which meant that during my school breaks I used to work a lot at different factories, even at one that was producing focaccia and pizza. This experience came in very handy as I already knew the ins and outs of the process. So that side of the business was all set, and that factory is still - to this day - the producer of Magioni pizza. 

20:04 

I thought internationally from the very beginning. In the first year of Magioni, we’ve already been active in nine countries and we had a lot of requests from the US as well. But then scaling fresh pizza is really hard, when you have to be shipping it to the US, so I narrowed down my ambitions to Europe. 

27:58

I think it’s a result of all the small steps that have been taken throughout the years with Magioni. In the beginning, you start with 30 stores and move towards 50 stores. You're introducing a new product, expanding to the UK. So, you celebrate the small successes, and when you look back, it’s already been five years. Then you realise that all the small steps resulted in a big success. But this is not what you see when you’re working on your product every day, trying to improve it, trying to create a fanbase. I think my biggest success was word-of-mouth. People liked my story and they shared it with other peers. And another very important success factor is a quality product. Magioni pizza is the best-selling chilled pizza product in the Netherlands. It sells even better than the traditional pizza, which for me is the biggest proof that the product is good.

44:23

For me, it was a very important lesson to hire people that are different from me. I made the mistake of hiring people who were very good in marketing when I needed professionals in logistics or supply chain. Also, in the beginning, it’s really easy for you to get people on board who are passionate about the idea, but at some point, those people don’t match with the company culture anymore. Your company’s needs change as you grow, so there comes the time when you need very good professionals, with hands-on experience in the FMCG environment.    

54:02

For Magioni it was a big momentum of healthier alternatives. I think you always need momentum to start a business, because if the time is not right, even the greatest of ideas will not take off.  

51:35

I think I could have hired experienced people earlier on, but I didn’t believe they wanted to come on board, because I thought the company was too small to get really talented people in your team. 

59:48

I always said I want to be an investor and now that I have a bit of seed capital, I want to start my own investing company with a particular focus on food/food technology startups. And this is what I am learning about now.