How Burger Index is reshaping the future of the F&B sector

How Burger Index is reshaping the future of the F&B sector 

Wassim Berro, Founder and CEO of data and insights platform Burger Index, explains how his product helps budding entrepreneurs and business owners navigate an increasingly competitive F&B industry in Europe and MENA.

We delve into Wassim Berro’s journey as an entrepreneur and explore how he and his co-founder Maurice Karam developed Burger Index, a data & insights platform that is transforming the food industry, helping founders achieve better results faster along the way. 

Wassim Berro (left) pictured alongside his fellow co-founder Maurice Karam

Origin story

Just like his father had before him, Wassim Berro ended years of work in the private sector to make a big bet and become an entrepreneur.

But before jumping head-first into the fray, Wassim enrolled with the IE Business School in Madrid, whose entrepreneurial track record seemed like a perfect fit. This is where he met his future co-founder Maurice Karam, who too was planning to set up his own business. 

Setting up the menu

For any entrepreneur, having access to the right information is crucial to solid decision making. However, in the F&B industry, collecting, processing, and analyzing data had always been a manual, strenuous, and lengthy process, causing delays in strategic decision making and ineffective, costly use of resources. Not to mention the fact that Google was not providing data in any format that could fuel a comprehensive understanding of the industry landscape. 

Having identified a real business need, Wassim started conceptualizing a platform that could serve as the Bloomberg of the F&B sector, providing in almost real time all the facts and figures industry players could need. The Burger Index concept was born.

The two fledgling entrepreneurs then submitted their idea to Startup Lab, a program giving students six weeks to work on their start-up, build their MVP, and begin raising funds. After completing this program, along with their MBA, the pair decided to pursue entrepreneurship full time.

Some things are hard to digest

The hardest part was yet to come. For any start-up, quickly generating revenue or raising funds is critical to achieving stability; so, to start with, Wassim and Maurice were able to gather Euro 200,000 in seed money from school alumni. But that amount would only take Burger Index so far. 

Wassim explains, “Building a start-up requires resources, and it is difficult to anticipate how quickly one can generate funds. It is important to note that the idea behind creating entrepreneurship is not to raise money but to build a business and generate revenue as quickly as possible. The team had to wait for about a year to generate funds, which was a difficult period in our lives but we didn’t dwell on it”. 

In addition, “Developing the necessary tech team and capturing clients was a challenge at the time,” says Wassim. “But we decided to extensively interact and engage with whoever we could - restaurants, cloud kitchens, and food brands. Over 70 interviews helped Burger Index gain insight into what the F&B industry’s pain points were and we focused on developing features that provided value and kept the customers coming back regularly.”

The Burger Index Advantage

Today, Burger Index operates in seven countries in Europe and the MENA region, collecting and sharing data at a global level and providing unique, priceless intelligence to its clients. Its AI-powered engine instantly develops and shares analysis on strategic aspects such as locations, products, menu, pricing, discounts, reviews, keywords, and more across over a billion products and stores globally.

Its ability to track competitors in real time alleviates one of its clients’ most cumbersome  tasks: monitoring the many changes in products, prices, locations, and promotions that are made in this highly competitive and extremely fast-moving sector. In Abu Dhabi alone, up to 200,000 changes can be made daily. Burger Index organizes all of this data so that its clients can make decisions in seconds, enabling prompt and informed reactions and ensuring that F&B businesses are not missing opportunities to generate revenue faster. 

Next, the platform aims to offer predictive and, ultimately, prescriptive analytics on top of the descriptive ones it now provides. To do so, co-founder Maurice Karam, who is taking care of the technical aspects of the business, is setting up a full-fledged tech team. An independent Sales Department will also be established in view of Burger Index’s expansion plans into about thirty countries. To stay ahead of the competition, the team is open to all possibilities, and even considers developing a super app that would integrate various analytics needs. 

Burger Index’s story of growth and success serves as a good case study for entrepreneurs, showing how newcomers in this highly competitive industry can succeed by identifying a real market need, finding a solution through innovative technology, and adopting a customer-centric approach.

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