UCook’s David Torr shares his recipe for success.
HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN EXPELLED from several posh schools, been a marijuana dealer at 17, cut off from his trust fund in his twenties – and voted by his classmates at the Red and Yellow School as the person most likely to go to jail, but David Torr, CEO and co-founder of South Africa’s largest meal-kit provider, UCook, was grinning from ear to exhausted ear when we met.
By the time you read this the company, founded by Torr and his friend Chris Verster Cohen in 2015 after they had met in Thailand, will be well on their way to opening their first unique flagship retail store at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront – “in a prime location near Woolworths”. They will be selling an assortment of dinner kits and other ready-made meal products. Besides getting into the retail sector, UCook will, in June, also launch a range of ready-made meals online.
The company, which delivers convenient, healthy dinner kits with easy-to-follow recipe cards, started off with Torr and friends packing meal ingredients into boxes from a garage in Cape Town. (They once sent off the kits without the recipes, he recalls.) The business had reached a turnover of close to R100 million by the end of last year.
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Denne historien er fra March 2019-utgaven av Noseweek.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Lennie The Liquidator Faces R500,000 Defamation Suit
After losing his cool when his fees were questioned
Panel Beater De Luxe
Danmar Autobody and its erstwhile directors get a serious panel beating in court papers. Corruption and theft are said to have destroyed the firm chaired by Nelson Mandela’s eldest daughter, leaving 200 workers destitute and threatening to kill.
Meet Covid Diarist Ronald Wohlman
Ronald Wohlman – EX SOUTH African copywriter, author, and actor – never dreamt that his lockdown diaries, written on Facebook and followed by people all over the world – would become his “life’s work”.
A Picture Of Peace?
Beware: Appearances can be deceptive
Flogging A (Battery-Driven) Dead Horse
Why plug-in vehicles are not all they’re cracked up to be– and, likely, never will be
Everybody Drinks Corona
I am hesitant to go Into the pub today. Not because it’s illegal, but there is a crème colored 1985 Mercedes 300D parked behind the pine tree. This means the devil is inside; that’s what we call Dr. De Villiers. You don’t know whether you will encounter the good doctor with the charming bedside manner or the violent, bipolar bully. The problem is, most of the time, you can never be sure which it is, so it’s best to always keep a social distance.
Never Take A Hypochondriac To A Pandemic
From Ronald Wohlman’s New York Corona Diary
The money train
Transnet in court battle with liquidators of Gupta-linked audit firm over R57m in ‘corrupt’ payments and invoices
‘He's no pharmaceutical genius, he's a vulture'
Pharma con seeks prison release to ‘help find Covid cure’
Bush school – A memoir
OUR SCHOOL WAS IN THE MIDDLE of the bush, ten miles from the nearest town in the harsh beauty of the Zimbabwean highveld. It started life in World War II as No 26 EFTS Guinea Fowl, a Royal Air Force elementary flying training school and I arrived there in 1954, just seven years after it became an all-white co-ed state boarding school.
