What They Do
Kenza Kitchen creates wraps from vegetables offering physical wellbeing and peace of mind to those on a low-calorie, weight-conscious diet. Kenza Kitchen wants to ensure people have a healthy relationship with food while respecting nature, and supporting customers with choices for a happier, healthier lifestyle.
The product is 100% vegetable wraps, a tastier preservative-free bread alternative without wheat or grains with a variety of familiar flavors. It wraps easily, provides higher fiber and nutrients, and has a one-year non-refrigerated shelf life. Most importantly Kenza Kitchen is helping people keep a healthy diet and minimize their food preparation time while reducing grocery waste.
Startup Experience
Co-founder of Kenza Kitchen, Randa Chlala states: “Since 2008 we started creating alternative snacking solutions. A year ago, I was taken by the swiftness of daily life and had reached a roadblock in my health and my culinary inspiration; I was dependent on bread for many of my meals and needed a breakthrough in my kitchen that would catapult my hurried lunches from fast food to a healthier option. So, I took my favorite health ingredient, spinach, and made a wrap from it to replace bread. That’s when I came up with the first 100% vegetable-based wrap.
Our 100% vegetable wraps allow consumers to have a sandwich without wheat or grains and that’s a game changer in the health food market. Our wraps appeal to a big number of people who lead a fast lifestyle and wish their sandwiches were healthier. These same people need clean vegetables in a practical way and that’s where Kenza wraps come in. Our most loyal customers are people with food allergies (gluten, keto, weight loss) or chronic weight-related health issues who seek to quit wheat bread. The wraps are an innovation that transforms common vegetables into a new and practical culinary staple.
I applied to the Agrytech Accelerator Program Special Edition because I believed it would be a great match for us as we share common values of being in the business of improving health through food. I needed the right experts to ensure the safety of the product, guidance on choosing the right sales channels, locally and internationally, and proper training on how to market and communicate through channels.
Some of our achievements throughout our journey were improving the quality, texture and flavor of the wraps, creating a new identity and brand book for our company, doubling our production capacity, expanding from organic stores to three new main segments which multiplied our sales one hundred folds, and growing our administrative team from two to six members.
Thanks to Berytech’s support, I was able to translate my innovation into a product and service. And with their mentorship I gained the managerial competence that was needed to identify opportunities and go for them locally and internationally.
Although we started out as two people, the program helped us grow the team by adding on experts that are crucial to our growth. We now collaborate to lead our business in a positive direction by proper planning, adapting to changing environments and understanding our own strengths and weaknesses.
We expanded our vision and started viewing our wraps as a necessity for anyone who seeks to eat vegetables, not just people with food allergies and as such we exponentially grew our potential markets with the right description of the product. This also encouraged us to develop new products from the same recipe, including chips and crackers, with more mind-blowing creations on the way. This of course needs a lot of research and development which thanks to the Berytech’s team we now know how and where to access more experts in the field.
Also considering that digital is the future, we teamed up with experts in marketing to create our whole digital campaign and strengthen our presence among all digital media moving forward.
One of the challenges we faced was finding the right people to join our team.
This is becoming more and more complicated as so many experts are leaving Lebanon. With the fluctuation of the dollar to LBP rate, there have been gaps in organic vegetable supply and sometimes elevated prices, but we are pursuing contract farming to ensure a steady supply of clean vegetables for our wraps.
As a long-term goal, we aim to revolutionize health and become the leading innovators in vegetable and fruit-based bread and snacks in Lebanon and the region. In addition to this, we hope to make organic agriculture a viable source of livelihood for farmers in the region while keeping our promise to be respectful of nature.”
To get in contact with Kenza Kitchen, click here.
About Agrytech
Berytech designed and developed the Agrytech program to make sure Lebanon has the most competitive companies that are sourcing, solving, growing, and transforming food, as well as feeding the world from Lebanon. The Agrytech Accelerator Program is under the ACT Smart Innovation Hub, a new out-of-the-box approach by Berytech, co-funded by the Kingdom of The Netherlands, which aims at strengthening business advancement and job creation in the Agri-food and Cleantech sectors in Lebanon. Berytech supports innovations across these sectors by offering startups the resources, knowledge, support, and funding worth around $35K, necessary to scale their ideas and grow them to penetrate international markets.
