City A.M. sits down with Simmy Dhillon, the co-founder of Simmer, a UK-based meal plan company .
They aim to take the stress out of cooking and have fresh tasty meals delivered to your door. Our first ever dish was our ‘OG Jerk Chicken’. I used to cook it in my university kitchen, then deliver meals on a second-hand bike I bought off Gumtree.
Seven years on, it’s still on our menu every week. I believe the reason it’s always been so popular is because it’s not something you’d usually get for a healthy lunch or a meal prep. It’s got plantain, rice, peas and our delicious homemade jerk sauce.
From a young age, Jhai and I have worked hard to be self-sufficient and relieve financial pressure from our parents. I had 3 part-time jobs by the time I reached sixth form. After three months of my first year at uni, I started Simmer with literally £10 worth of ingredients.
In 2017, I popped into the shops, bought ingredients, rustled up some meals, sold them, and then used the profits to produce and sell more meals. I’ve continuously reinvested the profits back into the business, and we’ve been 100 per cent bootstrapped ever since. Now, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
But honestly – I didn’t have a choice but to self-fund the business. Coming from a British Asian working-class background with no connections, and being only 19 at the time, it would’ve been highly unlikely that we’d have access to investors. Seven years on, we’re a profitable business.
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