The Nosh founder on why quitting the corporate world was the best thing he ever did, and how running a startup is a lot like war
I Am Generation T is a series of Q&As with some of the extraordinary individuals on the Generation T List 2018.
Max von Poelnitz was sick and tired. Sick of the oppressive strictures of corporate life, and tired of sacrificing his health for his job. “It was one of those jobs where you had to get in before the boss and leave after the boss,” von Poelnitz tells Generation T about his former life. As well as pulling long hours, von Poelnitz, like many Hongkongers, felt his health suffer due to the lack of healthy food options near his office.
Quitting the corporate world to launch a healthy food startup, then, must have seemed like the remedy to both of these symptoms. His first venture, Secret Ingredient, was part of the burgeoning ‘meal kit’ industry. Launched in 2011, the company delivered fresh, pre-prepared ingredients and easy-to-follow recipes for healthy home cooking. The concept took off around the world—US meal kit company Blue Apron was valued at just under US$2 billion at its IPO last year—but it failed to take off for von Poelnitz. Hongkongers, it turned out, just don’t cook at home as often.
The natural next step, therefore, was delivering the finished product to the consumer. And so, from the ashes of Secret Ingredient emerged Nosh, a “virtual cafeteria that designs meals specifically for delivery.” The company works with partners such as Deliveroo to deliver calorie-controlled meals to the health-conscious, the time-poor, and, for the most part, the desk-bound.