Halalivery - CEO Rawan Abu-Ishira
When we speak about the food industry one of the main concerns consumers worry about is trust. Trust that our food is processed up to the standards we expect. Trust that our food meets our dietary needs. And trust for the vendors that sell and delivery our food. Simply put, trust and food delivery go hand in hand.
The rapid growth the food delivery industry has witnessed is a testament to the convenience it provides consumers. Instead of going to supermarkets or restaurants and waiting in traffic and then in what may seem to be endless lines, consumers can now easily opt to simply take advantage of food delivery services operating within their area. As the market continues to diversify to meet the specialized needs of consumers, Halalivery emerges to meet those specific needs.
Co-founded in February 2018 by Rawan Abu-Ishira, Tawfiq Abu-Khajil and Amur Anzorov, Halalivery is the UK’s first on demand mobile application that provides users with a comprehensive list of partner halal vendors around the user’s location, where they can order halal food from restaurants, butcheries, and grocery stores to be delivered to their doorstep or to be picked up from the vendor. The app will be powered with the five main spoken languages by Muslims in the UK; English, Arabic, Punjabi, Urdu and Malay.
The Halalivery team consists of Rawan Abu-Ishira, Co-founder and CEO, has five years of experience in business development, product management and growth hacking, in addition to working top entrepreneurial firms and teams in Palestine. Rawan completed her masters in Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Management from the University of Nottingham. With a BSc in Software Engineering from the University of Nottingham, CTO, Amur Anzorov, has seven years of experience in software development, with extensive knowledge in combining technical and business solutions to achieve overall strategic goals. Tawfiq Abu-Khajil, COO of Halalivery, utilizes his experience of establishing and operating a startup in a student city, as well as a background working as the Student Marketing Manager of Yoop, a startup that tackles fake news.
The inspiration behind Halalivery emerges as a convenient solution for a large customer segment that prefers halal as their nutritional option. Rawan further elaborates upon her shared experience with the rest of the Halalivery team while pursuing higher education in the UK, “As students in the UK, we did not have the time nor the resources to travel for long distances on a daily basis to eat or pick-up foods that meet the halal requirement.” She continues “We all as founders enjoy cooking and always wished for a service that would get what we need in terms of ingredients on the go without having to spend massive amount of money at one go waste time at the store, and actually spend more time with the people who mean the most to us.” Upon finding out that several people around campus faced the same problem, Rawan and her team decided to put their business and tech experience to the test and developed their own solution which translated into Halalivery.
Rawan explains, “It is currently difficult to find Halal food by consumers and, if they did, they cannot ensure that their order is halal, and there isn’t a well-established presence online for such a service, especially for groceries and butcheries.” Therefore, Halalivery solves this problem by providing consumers with a food delivery service that is exclusively Halal. Users of the Halalivery service can trust that they are getting the highest quality halal food delivered to their door as quickly as possible.
In terms of challenges, Rawan explains that one of the main issues Halalivery works to resolve is onboarding vendors who comply with Halal food standards, however, these vendors tend to be smaller family owned businesses. As a result, it can be a bit more difficult for these smaller vendors to adopt newer technologies to expand their outreach. However, Halalivery is working to resolve these issues by selecting a smaller yet accessible market to develop the capacities of Halalivery. According to Rawan, Nottingham in the UK was selected as a test due to its smaller, accessible size as well as over 30,000 of its local population being Muslim. Due to this controlled sample, the Halalivery team was able to understand the dynamics and interactions of the vendors, drivers and users with the Halalivery application to assess weakness and enhance the experience through direct feedback, Rawan elaborates, “This feedback has resulted in the development of the new features that are need by our customer.” She continues, “On a higher level this test gave us the chance to understand the complete process of expansion to a new city without falling in the same mistakes, yet, be ready for obstacles as they come along the way.”
The Halalivery team is constantly working on optimizing user experience, especially through the implementation of the latest technology to continue to interact with customers and to maintain a quick and lean learning cycle. Currently in the works is an AI-powered chatbot to manage customer service activities. Rawan also explains, “We apply Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to make the whole journey from viewing choices of cousins up until getting the order delivered to the customer, faster, more efficient and cost effective.”
Additional updates include, a gamification loyalty system that will incentivize customers to use Halalivery, and enable participating vendors to boost their brand and grow their business. Halalivery has partnered up with ZEGO a pay as you go insurance service that enables new drivers to join Halalivery without having to overcome a substantial financial barrier in the form of large annual insurance premiums. Using remote access software, Halalivery efficiently manages their vendors’ devices, helping them manage their operations and solve their issues in real time without the need for time consuming visits. Finally utilizing React Native Framework for coding activities, allows the Halalivery team to continue to optimize user experience as well as to significantly reduce development costs.
In terms of market size, Halalivery caters to a segment of people who are looking for halal food options that can conveniently and efficiently be delivered to them. The Food Delivery Industry in the UK amounts to $120B with an annual growth of 17.7%, and currently over 1 billion people order their food online. These numbers in conjunction with the halal food market in the UK is quite large. According to statistics, despite the fact that Muslims, account for just 5% of the total population, they are not the only ones who opt for Halal. In fact, the halal meat market in the UK accounts for 15% of the total meat production. Addition numbers reveal, that the total halal food sales value $5B with an expected growth of 18-25% over the upcoming 5 years.
Halalivery is looking to secure $300,000 in investments and in the next three years Halalivery aims to expand to Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Leicester. Rawan further breaks this down, the total population within those cities is estimated at 2.8 M, the total number of people who order online is 33% equaled to 1 M. Funding will be further used towards enhancing Halalivery’s internal capacity and outreach.
Halalivery’s outreach features their Sponsorship with Student Societies, this involves sending an email to all participating members about Halalivery, as well as coverage on social media. Additional strategies include, stands and stalls at University campuses, as well as cross promotional activities with vendor partners. Further campaigns and social media videos, blogs and food recipes will also be used to raise awareness about Halalivery. Ultimately the team aims at rebranding Halal as a healthier nutritional option that is available for everyone.
In terms of Impact, Rawan had this to say, “One of Halalivery’s core values is to empower the local community and give and five them the opportunity to connect to their rights customers, enabling them to expand their work beyond their local reach.” Rawan adds, “Our human resources involve a multi-national level strategy, as we will be establishing a brand in Palestine where we outsource all of our development, design and customer services activities.” Furthermore, Halalivery supports students by providing internship opportunities by creating strategic partnership with the universities allowing them to get a hands on experience on startup development.
Rawan Abu-Ishira has since participated in the Dubai Pitch Challenge and earned a coveted spot amongst 10 high profile startups to attend a series of entrepreneurial and investor relations events in Dubai, she had this to say, “Dubai will be a great platform for us to get introduced to the right connections that will be of benefit to take Halalivery to the next level, either by mentorship or a partnership.”
To find out more visit, https://halalivery.co.uk