How Hampr helps multi-million dollar companies manage workplace hospitality

Duncan Riley (00:00.903)

Today, I'm excited to welcome our next guest, the co-founder and CEO of Hampr. Hampr is revolution using the multimillion dollar workplace hospitality industry by digitizing and streamlining how companies manage food and events. Their end of the B2B marketplace connects corporate office with top hospitality suppliers, empowering companies like TikTok, Salesforce, Stripe, and Netflix to save time, reduce costs.

and make smarter purchasing decisions. By simplifying the complexities of managing food and events across teams and locations, Hampr is bringing a long overdue digital transformation to the industry. Join me in welcoming Riz who's here to show you his journey and discuss how Hampr is helping food companies use food and events to shape workplace culture in the modern era. Welcome Riz.

Riz (00:52.61)

G'day Duncan, thanks for having me on the show.

Duncan Riley (00:55.483)

Yeah, no problem at all. So what is it that hamper is doing? What's the big problem that you're trying to solve out there?

Riz (01:05.292)

Yeah, sure. So look, I guess there's probably a little bit of a journey with Hampr in terms of what we've been solving and what we're solving today. But today we're solving the problem of that large corporates face or medium to large corporates face when it comes to managing their hospitality spend. So that could be catering, event spend, staffing, baristas, bartenders, cocktail staff, coffee, milk, alcohol, all of those kinds of things.

Managing that at scale across different teams, different departments, different individuals, different locations is quite challenging. It's a very large bucket of spend that people don't appreciate. And the complexity involved in from both the customer side and the supplier side is quite high. So we built some technology and to really support both sides of that marketplace to streamline their interactions.

Duncan Riley (02:00.135)

You know, it's a really, really interesting concept. I've worked in the corporate world myself and there's always events happening, whether that's, know, Paris Day, which is happening this weekend, or if it's around sort of Thanksgiving in the American market and whatnot. And it's a really interesting tool to sort of provide companies with the intelligence and for tracking their spend when it comes to catering and pantry items and whatnot.

What kind of led you to this moment of creating and developing Hampr? What was your kind of like, aha moment?

Riz (02:34.942)

Yeah, sure. Like, to be honest, I think there's a few. initially, so truth be told, initially, we started different business. And that business was, it was in this industry, but we were providing logistic support to restaurants to deliver catering into corporate offices. So that was the original business model. And the reason for that is, you know, we identified that there was this potential gap in the industry where

Duncan Riley (02:38.139)

Yeah.

Riz (03:02.478)

corporates were typically only ordering their catering from cafes and caterers. And we thought, hey, these restaurants are being left out of the market. It was around the time that B2C food delivery apps were really kicking off and Uber Eats and Deliveroo, et cetera. So we thought, okay, maybe there's a reason that they can't get their food into corporate. And we thought that was delivery. So we thought, okay, let's bring in a logistics support model for restaurants. That sort of...

We did that for about nine months and although we thought it was a great idea, in hindsight, at the time we realized very quickly probably it wasn't a good idea. So we kind of decided to wrap that up. We had about 20 customers that I think we begged to work with us during that time. So we went around to all of them and said, look, when I say customers, mean corporate. the solution was logistics support for restaurants. So they were our core customer, but...

for corporates, were able to place orders and view what they're, you know, where their orders are up to. so we went around to our customers who are the corporate customers and said, Hey, look, thanks so much for using us, but this isn't going to work out. So, you know, thank you, but we've got to leave you and say goodbye. But what was really interesting was that, you know, almost all of them, if not all of them said the same thing, which was that, Hey, look, we really enjoyed this, this dashboard that you'd built where we could visualize all the different orders we had. So.

my co-founder, Steve and I, kind of took that on notice. We thought about it for a little bit. And then we decided to go back to them all. And we thought, hey, not just them, but let's like, that was really interesting. Why would everyone say the same thing? And we didn't even think the value added was really for them. We thought the value added was for the suppliers. And that kind of embarked us on a journey of understanding a world of pain when it came to corporate, corporate purchasing. So I think broadly B2B transactions and corporate.

is very challenging and there's a lot of pain points and when we look at our industry which is hospitality so catering, food, beverages, staffing, things like that, there's an added layer of complexity as well. So from that we understood that there was a problem to be solved for the end user. So in other words, the person placing the orders usually could be a receptionist, an office manager, an EA or a facilities assistant or something like that.

Riz (05:24.238)

So that's where we started. thought, okay, let's let's solve their pain points. They've got a million things to do every single day. Everyone's asking them for different things all the time. And then they say, Hey, can you organize catering for this or I need muffins for that workshop or, know, I've got VIP guests coming into the board next Tuesday, make sure we've got the best caterer. So for these people organizing that kind of food or catering, they're not always experts. And then traditionally they've had to rely on direct relationships with suppliers. So pick up the phone.

you know, send emails, a lot of these people using notepads. But when you use that type of system, especially when you've got many orders, many teams, many locations, it doesn't work. And then you've got to think about budget management, billing, payments, all these other factors. So we started off by solving for them and providing solutions for them. But truth be told, the last six years now where we're up to, we've got a great solution for the end user.

But more and more, we're starting to add value up the chain. So to finance teams, to leadership teams, to people and culture teams as well, we can tell, you we can help them manage budgets across companies, access control, spend control, reporting and insights. A lot of large corporates want to understand how much they're spending on indigenous spend, women owned businesses, ESG initiatives and things like that. Very difficult to report. So we support a lot of that.

Duncan Riley (06:46.845)

It's actually an amazing concept and I absolutely love your story. What's really fascinating for me is there's a huge drive to get people back to the office and...

Obviously, people need to track where they're putting their money and initiatives within the workplace and how do they incentivize people back to the office. it's always through food. It's always through some sort of getting people together, bringing them together. Maybe that's on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and putting lunch on for them. And I think hampers are really good tool to sort of, I guess, bridge the gap between the corporate and the supplier.

and allow the corporates to be able to put budget towards it and be able to track it efficiently. I think it's a really innovative way to bring people together using a great tool like Hampr.

Riz (07:41.773)

Yeah, I agree. think so. But what we found interesting, and this is where, you know, when COVID occurred, so that obviously impacted our business significantly, but at the time, I think there was a big question around what will the future of work be like? Pre-COVID, everyone was coming into work every day. Food and beverage was still there, but you didn't need food and beverage to get people into the office because people had to come in anyway.

But the fact that food and beverage still brought people together when they're in the office was always true. But what's so interesting is that since post-COVID with hybrid working, the fact that food is now used not only as a tool to get people to network when they're in the office, but to actually bring them in as well. we've seen, interestingly, we had predicted that the industry size would shrink post-COVID because

If you've got people coming in three, say two or three days a week, then you might make the assumption to say, the, industry spend will be two to two or two thirds or three thirds, what it was. But interestingly, that's not the case. We're seeing, budgets stay around the same for most organizations and what they're doing is actually spending more when people are in the office and workplaces that never really looked at using food as a lever, and now doing so. So the importance of food, I think is, is even more.

significant in a hybrid world.

Duncan Riley (09:06.727)

Yeah, definitely. I couldn't agree more with you on that one. And so are you operating just across Sydney or have you got plans to go further out? Have you got plans at all there, Riz?

Riz (09:19.694)

Yeah, definitely. So currently we're in all Australian major cities. So except for Darwin and Hobart, but we've got some small presence there, but not a large presence like the other cities. We're also in Auckland and Wellington. So we've kind of gone across the gap over there. But our plans are definitely yes to go international. We're looking to enter into Singapore later this year in late 2025. And I guess the ultimate

Duncan Riley (09:45.309)

Fantastic.

Riz (09:47.183)

expansion path from there is either to through to Europe and the UK or into the US, but we'll take it a step at a time. I think for us, it's always been, you know, we have entered into an industry that has traditionally been, for lack of a better term, like an analog industry. It's very much relationships with suppliers that have kind of the way that everything's worked. for us, like introducing technology,

Duncan Riley (10:05.661)

Yep.

Riz (10:15.0)

to an industry like this and trying to digitize B2B transactions, it's been a learning curve and I think we're still along the way. So our focus has always been, know, let's get the product right. Let's make sure that we can make it work in Australia, maybe New Zealand, maybe Singapore. And if we can really truly facilitate, you know, a great deal of that B2B offline transaction and move it online, then for us, I think,

wherever we go, should be able to just apply that model.

Duncan Riley (10:45.255)

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess it's a great question to ask is, obviously you've had some great success so far, but through building your business, what would you say is your biggest challenge that you've had to come up against? And maybe that was early on, maybe it's currently right now. And how did you kind of go about overcoming that?

Riz (11:09.366)

Yeah, great question. I think there's many challenges every single day for any business. And I try to look at it from kind of a lifetime of the business and what has been the most painful at that point in time. But I would say for us COVID was significant because we started about a year and a half pre-COVID and we had a good journey. And then when COVID hit, as you can imagine, our

Duncan Riley (11:15.901)

in the next

Riz (11:38.799)

platform is for officers and people need to be in the office for it to make sense. So everything shut down. And I still remember it was March of 2020 when all of a sudden every order was canceled in our system. And the most challenging element for us was trying to make decisions or assumptions of what the future was going to be like. you know, Q1, you're thinking, okay, people are going to come back to work in three months.

that doesn't happen. go, okay, well, we need to look for short term revenue options. What are adjacent things? So we did things like digital, online experiences, gift cards, you know, home delivery and things like that. Not core business. Definitely not worth it. but you know, we still treat, tried to do something. And then as you get into the nine, 12 month period of COVID, you're thinking, okay, is this business sustainable? Is this worth it? We've got no cashflow or very minimal cashflow. We've had to let go.

Duncan Riley (12:23.677)

Thank

Riz (12:36.024)

the whole team except for the founders. How much longer do we hold on? We're still relatively young. We can start another business if we want to. So that was very difficult. So we had to make some assumptions and we made an assumption that people would come back and that this model will work. But holding on particularly the last six months before things started to ramp back up was very challenging. And then also that post COVID period where during COVID the investment appetite was actually quite strong.

Duncan Riley (13:05.309)

Yep.

Riz (13:05.472)

a lot of companies were getting huge valuations and raising a lot of capital. But for us in our industry, it was the opposite. We were going down. coming out of COVID, it was hard to raise capital. in you know, in hindsight, that was a good thing for us. It taught us to be resilient. It taught us to be to build a cashflow positive business. It taught us to understand our numbers and our finances. And I think if that had not happened, we would be in a very different position right now. So I feel like we

We were forced to build a real business as opposed to potentially raising capital and building a business that was dependent on investment.

Duncan Riley (13:42.365)

Absolutely. I was that kind of like, you know, I was going to say, take us back to the early days. You know, what like, what what did you do before hampering? You know, I guess what like, did you fall into this and like overcoming those challenges must have been pretty difficult if you know, especially trying to stop a business or a COVID in the industry that you're in must be very challenging. But yeah, like, I guess, you know, what was it like moving from your day job?

and then transitioning into becoming an entrepreneur. How was that for you?

Riz (14:13.428)

Yeah, sure. That was probably one of the most challenging things to be honest that I think I've done. Not because the act of itself is challenging, but it's more I think the shift in your mental space or your headspace to go from working a day job to starting your own business. I think for me it was a bit of a journey. I went to university.

Duncan Riley (14:20.401)

Yeah.

Duncan Riley (14:41.18)

Yeah.

Riz (14:41.714)

throughout uni, I was always tinkering with different ideas on the side or side businesses and things like that. going to hackathons, trying to build things and whatever it might be coming out of uni, I got a grad job at KPMG. So did the, did the consulting thing. and then I, but even when I was at KPMG and then I think I went and worked at the ACCC in, in economics. I was an economist. That's what I did. but during that time, I tried a few different startups on the side. One of them.

did get a bit of traction and that was in the travel space. We got a bit of traction. I didn't know anything about startup, so I probably approached that in every wrong way possible. But from then, that experience, was like, no, I think that's what I wanna do. I definitely wanna run my own business, do my own startup. So with Hampr or the business prior to Hampr, which was the logistics thing, I said to my partner at the time, said, look,

Duncan Riley (15:20.125)

Yep.

Riz (15:39.919)

I'm going to quit my job. So I'm not going to have any income for about a year. So we're to have to kind of make this work. Give me a year and I'll bring some money in. And truth be told that year turned into two, but eventually, you know, we started to think started to work out. But I think the biggest challenge was in a day job, you have a defined role and you kind of know what your expectations and responsibilities are.

Duncan Riley (15:46.61)

Yeah.

Riz (16:06.402)

They could be wide ranging, you have a good grip on what that is. When you venture out and you start your own business, especially in the early days when you're on the startup journey, it might be yourself, you might have a co-founder, maybe one or two of you, or maybe three if you're lucky in the organization, and you have to do everything. And for me, that was, I guess I didn't appreciate that fact.

you know, back then, I remember I went from wearing a suit every day to delivering food in the city. on, you know, on foot, or on bike, like it w it was a big transition and then having to do sales marketing, you know, managing customers, operations, finance, product. And then all of a sudden having to balance all of those things at the same time, it was a, it was definitely, a surprise and an experience, but that being said, I.

It's probably the most valuable thing I've done in my career in terms of building my personal skill set up and my confidence in what I do. So even at Hampr right now, you know, we're, up to 40, 45 people and I think I've done everyone's job. So, you know, and I could have not done it for two years and I don't hear about it, but if I get a question, I'll be like, yes, that's familiar. And I'm comfortable to get into, into the weeds and help you with that. or have an opinion at least, cause I've, I've done that myself. So.

Duncan Riley (17:06.685)

Yeah.

Duncan Riley (17:15.387)

Hopefully. Yeah.

Riz (17:31.244)

I think it's quite valuable and I genuinely believe that it significantly helps how successful a company can be if the founders start off in the weeds.

Duncan Riley (17:43.229)

I absolutely agree. I was going to say, you think your experience doing consulting or being in the corporate world ever equipped you for the journey that you've been on so far? It's probably like a bit of yes, bit of no.

Riz (17:57.995)

Yeah, look, there's definitely bits and pieces for sure. Like you dealing with clients, understanding how to write prospective emails, things like that. For me personally, I think it was more the numbers side. Having a bit of a numbers background professionally helped me with the numbers in the business internally. Look, I think there's a lot of things that you can, a lot of skill sets that translate over. But the one thing, and I think one of the core differences between

corporate and startup or going into your own businesses is that sense of ownership. Like, yes, you can own your role in corporate, but the mental shift from owning your role to owning all the problems in the business is quite challenging. Yeah.

Duncan Riley (18:42.289)

Definitely, definitely. No, can definitely see what you mean there. So I know you've been on a bit of a journey so far. You've gone from starting a business up, of going through COVID and having to rethink your idea and coming at the other end of that. And then obviously now having 45 staff members is very impressive.

Within your industry, obviously it seems to be evolving at the back of COVID, but where do you see it heading and what's on the horizon for hamper?

Riz (19:15.042)

Yeah, great question. Look, I think...

Our industry, so corporate food and beverage, or I would pull it back a little bit to just say corporate procurement or B2B transactions is fundamentally very different to B2C. And the key difference is that in B2C transactions, if you're going to go purchase something, I don't know, from eBay or wherever, you've got no bargaining power. You've got no power at all, actually, as a consumer.

whatever's there is what you're buying and you either decide to pay for it or not. In the B2B space, the way that things transpire in action is that customers and suppliers, so corporates and corporate suppliers will have these kind of transactional conversations. They could be about a customized invoice or a customized quote or some sort of discount or...

hey, you because the corporates have such buying power, suppliers are willing to shift. And it's very difficult from a tech point of view. And some people are working on it, but to really bring the physical nature of a B2B transaction to a digital sphere. And I think that's kind of one of the biggest challenges in our space. And we've done a lot to help with that.

and I think we've got a lot of ideas and a lot, a lot further to go, but that's kind of the biggest thing. Like, how do we make these offline interactions? How do we digitize them? And how do we make it work from a commercial point of view, for the, enable them to do business. so it's kind of like, how do you make these human pain points and solve, how do you solve these human pain points that are easier often to solve in a human way, but actually use tech to do so.

Duncan Riley (20:50.577)

Yep. Yep.

Riz (21:08.094)

and digitizing that human element. So that's kind of, think, the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for us. AI, obviously, is potentially going to help with some of that, but also just getting into the weeds of really sitting next to our customers to not just listen to what they're saying, but watch what they're doing, to pick up on those things and say, okay, I didn't realize you did that. Maybe there's a way we can think about how we automate that or how we support you online.

Duncan Riley (21:37.469)

Exactly. It's really interesting. I think it's really, I mean, thought a lot of people are finding it challenging to keep up with evolving technologies and how can they improve their technology or service or digitalization of their process using AI. And I feel like every day at the moment, there's something new coming out which is always evolving. Have you utilizing any AI at the moment?

whether that's in your back end processes or within your tool. And what does that look like, if so?

Riz (22:13.59)

Yeah, definitely. mean, look, in terms of internal operations, internal processes, do use bits and pieces of AI, but we have probably not fully embraced it as much as possible. I think the sales team would use quite a bit, especially to be able to kind of whip together summaries and things like that as well, or understand industry. But in terms of our business and our solution, yeah, there's definitely...

some interesting things that we're keen to look into or starting to look into, particularly when it comes to customer decision making support. So I think I said earlier that often the people that are the end users, so people that are placing orders and not experts, they don't know what they should be ordering. All they know is that they need to get order something and hopefully it's the right thing. And

if it's wrong, they're probably going to get in trouble. Right? So it's quite a stressful space. for us, how can we support those end users with decision making support? So for example, if a customer has a request, it's, you know, I've got 50 people coming in for this seminar. It's a half day seminar. need breakfast, morning tea and lunch. I've got another request where we're going to do a big

Duncan Riley (23:09.351)

Yeah.

Riz (23:36.405)

social town hall event, I need a live cooking station or whatever it might be and these are my parameters. So they come with that information. So when they go and try to make the transaction themselves, it's still very, challenging for them. So how can we take that data set, mine through all the transactions that we've had, the hundreds of thousands of transactions that we've done to date, to try and draw insights and also use a bit of human...

heuristics in terms of what we're doing to give them some support. So that's kind of where I think there's going to be a lot of value that we can unlock a lot of value. And I think that's where the industry is going to head in the future. It's those kinds of kinds of things where AI really helps. So if you think of it, a workplace, what are those manual steps that people need to do? So I've got to run something for my team, I'll hit up my EA or the receptionist or the office manager and say, I need staff, I need alcohol, I need

or just put the event on for me. So instead of it going through an office manager, is there a way that you can just ask Hampr, for example, and we just organize it for you? Is there a way that you could say to Hampr, hey, my budget is $100,000 for the next six months. I've got six teams. This is what I'm doing. Can you please draw up what the next six months of what I should do? And, you know, or you could say, hey, Hampr, my goal is to improve the culture of the company. I want to use food.

Duncan Riley (24:39.037)

interest.

Riz (25:02.802)

and this is my budget, people are coming in twice a week, here's some data, help me. So that's kind of where I think really you can infuse AI machine learning data to help real world outcomes for workplaces.

Duncan Riley (25:18.212)

That's really exciting. And you can immediately see how that would make someone's job a lot easier. Forward planning for the rest of the year and having maybe that AI agent that provides recommendations on different catering ideas for specific times of the year. I think that's very, very exciting. Very exciting.

Riz (25:39.533)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot of like this, industry is going through a transition. It's kind of like replacing the old guard with the new in two ways. So one, when I say the old guard, I mean the business model. So offline transactions with, with online transactions, but also I mean the service delivery model that was in the corporate space pre COVID when, when you had people in five days a week, some of the big

Duncan Riley (25:48.562)

Yeah.

Riz (26:09.326)

large corporate service providers like Compass Group and Sodexo, international multi-billion dollar listed organizations, they benefited off the fact that you needed, their business model, sorry, benefited off the fact that having a kitchen on site or five days worth of wait staff or boardroom attendants and things like that made sense. in a hybrid working world, workplaces want to be able to turn up and turn down as required.

you know, next Wednesday, I've got the whole office coming in, let's do something then. Friday's quiet, I don't want to do anything. And that that's where kind of the hampr book business model of leveraging external suppliers with technology to support them is quite valuable. So I'm really excited to as to where this is going. I think this is we're just at the start of what this journey can look like. So I guess that's what motivates me. I'm like, okay, cool.

Duncan Riley (27:02.673)

Yep.

Riz (27:06.018)

We've gotten to where we've gotten through, I guess, a series of unfortunate fortunate events, but now we're at this place where, we actually built something that a lot of leading workplaces love, and they're willing to work with us and open up their doors to share their challenges so that we continue to build for them.

Duncan Riley (27:27.201)

It's really encouraging, you know, listening to your journey, Riz, and seeing how the platform's evolved and essentially what you can do to improve it, enhance it for your customers and actually make their life a lot easier using technology. And we can only thank you for taking the time out to spend some time with us on the show and giving us some more information about Hampert.

Riz (27:56.694)

No problem. Thanks Duncan, really appreciate your time.

Duncan Riley (27:59.783)

Thank you Rets, and we'll speak to you soon.

Riz (28:01.741)

No worries, thanks.