OUR FOUNDERS OF THE WEEK- Co-founders of OWN Snacks, brothers Noor Gamali (LinkedIn) and Ameer Gamali ( LinkedIn).

We’re Noor and Ameer Gamali, the brothers who co-founded OWN Snacks. When we first started, we were all equally involved with all sides of OWN — from production to marketing to business development, you name it. As the business evolved, we each began to handle different facets of the business based on our interests and strengths. Noor handles the marketing and sales side of the business, while Ameer manages the financial side of the equation and spends most of his day in the factory monitoring the production and manufacturing side of the business. We still involve each other in the different sides, and have recurring meetings where the entirety of the team shares ideas to ensure the success of the company.

Our third co-founder is our father, Yasser Gamali, who helped guide us in all aspects of running the business. We also consider Reem Gamali, our mother, who helped us with branding and so much more, and Mariam Gamali, our younger sister, who devotes her downtime to the company in so many ways, as honorary co-founders of OWN Snacks. We are a family business through and through.

While we were both completing our bachelor’s degrees at IE university in Madrid, we used to intern at investment banks in Cairo. Upon graduation, we relocated back to Egypt in 2019 and started our entrepreneurial journey, and launched OWN in 2021.

We decided to address consumers’ demands for healthy, nutritional snacks. Having spent our college years abroad, we noticed a booming trend in the healthy snacks sector in Europe and beyond, and observed a gap here in Egypt that we felt needed to be filled, especially as awareness is at an all-time high here, despite the limited range of products available.

The response of the local market was very positive, and that reassured us that Egypt was ready for the wide range of innovative nutritional products we have in mind.

Our products are all natural, without any additives, chemicals, preservatives, or coloring. We use high quality-ingredients. We don’t use any fillers and flavors such as corn flakes, rice crisps, or syrups. We’re proud of the fact that our high-quality products have garnered great reviews, and were the snack of choice for Egyptian Olympians from the Track and Field team during the Tokyo Olympics.

Our goal is to help people own their day, and that’s where the name OWN stems from. Our motto is: “Own your food, own your life.” Giving ownership to consumers when it comes to nutritious products, whether they be average joes who just want nutritious alternatives to unhealthy snacks, or athletes who are specifically focused on their caloric and protein intake, is our main goal. What we aim to do is offer convenient and healthy snacks that you can find anywhere and have at any time of the day. We truly believe that when people eat better, they can achieve more.

We want to be there for our customers and offer them healthy alternatives throughout the day, from sunrise to sunset. Aside from protein bars and protein chunks, we have cool products that will be released within the coming month that will go further to address customers’ needs throughout the day. Customer satisfaction is always at the forefront of our business. We want to be there for our customers when having their coffee in the morning, when they have a quick snack in the afternoon, and when they’re looking for a nutritious dinner. Customers can find our products in coffee shops like Costa Coffee, and when they’re on the go, they can purchase our selections online or find our products on the shelves of supermarkets, gyms, convenience stores, and even select kiosks.

Our products are currently on offer in 600 different retail outlets in Cairo, Alexandria, Gouna, and Ain Sokhna, and are also available for online purchase through our website. One of our short-term goals is to expand further throughout Egypt, and to cover more governorates.

The initial challenge we faced as young entrepreneurs was the shock of the adjustment period we faced after college. Working in the food industry is specifically demanding. The attention to detail associated with this sector is particularly unique. There is no tolerance for mistakes when it comes to any side of the business: Whether it’s quality, manufacturing, storage, or anything else, when you’re working in this sector, your reputation can make or break your business. With that in mind, we decided to consult quality control advisors to learn more about the ins and outs of quality assurance from the onset. We continue to consult them. We also have an internal lab to ensure the standard we have in mind remains top tier.

Another challenge we faced when we first started was the fact that, because of the demanding workload, we both had no time for weekends or holidays. One of the worst parts of the job was finding the talent to join our team. With time, however, we’ve attracted the right people and now have a solid team — and can enjoy our weekends [laugh].

The best part of the job for us is seeing the impact we’re having on people who want to lead healthier lives. We love seeing our hard work coming to fruition and witnessing that we’re bettering people’s lives.

Finding a healthy work-life balance was definitely problematic in the beginning. Carving out the time for recreational activities with the stress of ensuring the success of a startup looming over our heads was tough to say the least. With time, however, we learned how to carve out some time in the day to do something that reenergizes us for the next day of work.

The most important KPI we focus on is customer satisfaction. We do this through tracking customer reviews and keeping note of the number of recurring customers who frequent our online channel. We can also note the level of offline customer satisfaction by monitoring the volume of our offline sales through supermarkets, convenience stores, gyms, or any other retail outlet. We’re also focused on customer acquisition: We believe in the quality of our product, and know that the hard work that was put into our product range will ultimately turn new customers into repeat consumers.

In the short term, we want to continue to expand our product range and have even more diverse offerings that our customers can have from sunrise to sunset. We’re not restricting ourselves to protein bars and chunks at all. We will be venturing beyond that. We are also looking forward to exporting our products abroad by the end of 2022, or early on in 2023.

We onboarded a private investor in the beginning of 2022 to raise some capital that will fund the growth of our startup for the time being. We are looking forward to attracting more investors by the end of the year, so we can raise enough to fuel our expansion plans.

In our downtime, we enjoy riding motorcycles in the Saqqara Desert. It’s awesome to hang out with a diverse community of bikers made up of expats and locals from all walks of life. Another added benefit? It’s a very intense workout. For us, riding in the desert re-energizes us for the next week of work. We also have another passion project of our own; we’re working on restoring an old motorcycle from the 80s.