NY Launch Pod: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod the New York Press Club award winning podcast highlighting the most interesting new startups, businesses and openings in the New York City area. I’m your host and New York attorney Hal Coopersmith and in this episode we talk to Umber Ahmad, founder of Mah-Ze-Dahr the very special New York City bakery located in the West Village and is now expanding. At this point we’re going to bring on our producer and paralegal Andrew Kane. Andrew, you just moved to New York so you didn’t know about Mah-Ze-Dahr before the interview and I guess we can excuse that. But what people may not know about Mah-Ze-Dhar is the way the business is structured.
Andrew Kane: That’s right, Umber brought us some fantastic treats and I was very excited to discover Mah-Ze-Dahr. One thing that many people do not know is that Mah-Ze-Dhar prides itself on its sustainable approach to doing business by paying its employees living wages, offering health care, and being environmentally friendly.
NY Launch Pod: So whether you love food or business or both there’s a lot of great stuff here. But before we go to the interview if you are a fan of the New York Launch Pod please subscribe on your podcast listening app and for news and updates please subscribe to our monthly newsletter at nylaunchpod.com. So with that, lets go to the interview.
NY Launch Pod: So I’m very excited to be doing this interview, Mah-Ze-Dahr. It just feels so New York to me. How did Mah-Ze-Dahr come to be?
Umber: Oh my goodness. So Mah-Ze-Dahr came to be, I think just from the evolution of my life. So Mah-Ze-Dahr, the word is a word from the Urdu language, which is a language we speak in Pakistan, which is where my family is from. And it’s a word that we use to describe the magic or the essence that makes something special. So we use it to describe foods, delicious. It’s also a word that we use to describe the connectivity that we find in people or experiences. And we always say that there’s a Mah-Ze-Dahr in somebody that we meet or something that happens to us. But growing up it was always how we found the connection to something that happens in our life. So growing up, I always wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to try to help people. I went through engineering school, I went through public health school, started doing healthcare consulting, wanted to learn more about the financial side of those things, went to business school, went onto wall street to really understand finance. I Went through sort of the traditional investment banking and private equity side of things with major firms. And then finally decided that I wanted to start my own firm and help all of those clients that the large firms would say no to. So when I was at Goldman Sachs, we would say no to firms that were companies that maybe were too small or too new or were in geographies that people didn’t understand or you know, things like that. And I said, you know, I’ll take you on as a client. I have faith in you because you might be the next great thing. And in doing that, a chef named Tom Colicchio became a client of ours and he found out through mutual friends,
NY Launch Pod: Small name, Tom.
Umber: Small guy, not on TV, not interesting, bad food. And he found out that I made food and he said, I heard you make a great cake. And I said, okay. And he said, I want to try your food and all I could picture was him telling me to pack my knives and go. And I was like, absolutely not. I’m never going to cook for you. And then I sort of suspended my disbelief and I said, all right. And I started to make food for him at the end of which he said, either you do something with this or you’re going to be making a really big mistake in your life. And I decided to become my own client and take what I love to do and turn it into a business. And that’s how Mah-Ze-Dahr came to be.
NY Launch Pod: Finance is an intense world in New York. We know that. How are you developing this culinary aspect of your life? While you’re involved in the financial world?
Umber: It’s just about passion. It’s about something that you love to do. I grew up in a culinary family, being from another part of the world and living in the United States was always a great opportunity to bring different parts of you together. My family used to travel around the world. Every year we would live in another country. Every summer we would learn about different people through the foods that they ate. So food for us became a language and just became another way for us to discover people. So that was just something that I love to do. I love to cook, I love to learn about food and I love to bake. So it was just something I just kind of did on the side and it was never anything that I thought I would do as a profession but it was something that I love to do. So I spent time doing it.
NY Launch Pod: Did it on the side. Your baked goods are absolutely amazing. How did it get to that point? I mean, that’s, that’s what I want to know. I mean, it’s more than just a side gig, I think.
Umber: Thank you. You know, I think it’s when you really care about something, you really put your heart and soul into it. I’m also by training an engineer and also as a banker and somebody in finance, extraordinarily precise. And that’s something around baking that I think anyone who’s ever tried to make a cake or make cookies or do anything can appreciate. There’s a real high level of precision in that. And so I think that part of my brain and that part of my soul really kicked in. And the more that you continue to try to refine that, the more you find the perfection in something like that.
NY Launch Pod: So we’re going to probably say this a million times over the podcast. The food is absolutely delicious. I mean, every New Yorker knows that, but how are you coming up with the new concepts for your baked goods?
Umber: That’s a great question. New concepts come from a variety of things. They come from suggestions from other people. They come from just sort of mining through my own history, things that I remember from childhood, they come from our team. I’m blessed to have an incredible culinary team that we all work together. So it’ll come from ideas from our pastry cooks, from our pastry chefs. Everybody comes to the table and has great ideas. It often comes from seasonality. So we were literally having a conversation yesterday in the kitchen about quince. We all love quince as a fruit and we were sort of talking about, you know, how we can utilize that in a pastry. So it’s really just sort of thinking about how to be innovative. We often also challenge ourselves with other cultures. So we take trips three or four times a year, go to different countries and say, you know, people are really excited about this flavor combination or this shape or this idea or the spice and really try to come up with things.
NY Launch Pod: So you come up with an idea and then how long does it take for you to get it to a Mah-Ze-Dahr shelf?
Umber: Oh my gosh, that depends. I would say less than 10% of what we start out with actually ends up on our menu. So I would say it probably takes anywhere from three to nine months before anything gets on our menu.
NY Launch Pod: And then how do you know that something makes the cut?
Umber: We don’t, I mean, we will put it on the menu and we’ll think that it’s fantastic and oftentimes this has happened I would say probably four or five times over the life of the brand where we as a team collectively are really excited about something and we’ll introduce it on the menu and people don’t like it and we get feedback that they don’t enjoy it or it doesn’t sell. And we’re heartbroken because we love it but we have to listen to our community and we have to make what sells. But very often we get great feedback or we do test runs and we, you know, we trust the people that we sell to. And you know, if it sells well then we know it’s going to be a hit.
NY Launch Pod: And so as you were growing this from what you were doing on the side as you’re growing up, then you decided to have a business. What was that transition like? You were doing things on a smaller scale and now you’re scaling up and you just talked about how precise everything needs to be in order to have that quality. How are you able to execute on that?
Umber: I went from one cake to say I’m going to make a hundred cakes. I’m making 12 chocolate chip cookies to making 1200 chocolate chip cookies. One of the things that has been extremely helpful is, I personally am not professionally trained in the culinary arts, so bringing in people who are trained, who have extraordinary backgrounds and have that information at hand and have those skillsets. As an entrepreneur, you become very good at knowing what you know and knowing what you don’t know and very humble and then asking for help and finding the best people to help you in those ways. So I know that I’m not a great person at figuring out how to scale this, so I have found wonderful people in the industry to help me think about how I can go from, I can make these incredible brownies and I can make them 12 at a time. I know how to make them a hundred at a time. I don’t know how to make them a thousand at a time. Let’s figure that out together. So that’s sort of how we’re sort of going about scaling the business.
NY Launch Pod: And what techniques have those experts or people who are familiar with it brought to the table? What have they taught you? What’s something that you didn’t know?
Umber: So a couple of things. I would say the first is around automation. There’s certain things that I learned that could be automated. There are certain parts of the process that can be scaled up well with large pieces of machinery or that can actually be purchased in sort of like large blocks of butter that have already been cut and things like that. And there’s other things that still need to be manually executed. Some things that I’ve sort of had to make peace with is there are certain of our products that we did really well when we were a small bakery that we just can’t do anymore. Certain things that were hand made. We made these, we made these things called mallomars. So our version of a mallomar, which is a really beautiful biscuit that has handmade marshmallow that’s dipped in chocolate. And every piece of that process was hand done and it was beautiful and it was hand executed and they were so good. We could do them when we were making a hundred of them. But if we needed to make 6,000 of them, there was no that way we could do it and we could probably find a way to automate them, but they weren’t going to taste the same and and have that same level of quality. So we discontinued them and people were upset. But at the same time, I wasn’t willing to compromise who we were as a brand and the food itself in order to say, okay, well let’s find a way to automate them. So it’s unfortunate because sometimes some of my favorite things end up not making the cut, but it kind of is what it is. One of the other things that we struggle a little bit with is also shelf life. So when you think about food or you think about an inventory, for example, if I were the Gap and I could make a tee shirt, I could sell the tee shirt today. I could sell the tee shirt tomorrow. I could probably sell the tee shirt in a month or two months or six months. If I make cookies today, I can maybe sell them tomorrow. I can’t sell them in a month or two months or six months. So the majority of my inventory expires every 24 hours. So having to find that balance and thinking about how do I scale the business, how do I make large batches but not so large that I have a lot of waste, but then be able to scale it so that I can have a meaningful full amount of revenue generated and have it balanced with how much labor is required to actually produce the product has been, I would say one of our biggest challenges in scaling the business significantly.
NY Launch Pod: So how do you find out what sells the best?
Umber: Trial and error I guess is the best way to say it. And we know we have a core set of products that sell really well. We also ship nationwide. I started the business online, which has been wonderful and so we continue to have a really strong following all throughout the United States. So we know very well what sells outside of New York and we know what sells inside of New York so we can kind of continue to balance and test sort of what people want and how they want it and when they want it. We know what sells in the summer, we know what sells in the winter, we know what people want around Valentine’s Day, we know what people are going to want for Thanksgiving and what they’re going to want at Christmas.
NY Launch Pod: And you already talked about it, but an important part of your story even, you know, while I was researching you, you say discovered by Tom Colicchio. Can you talk about why that’s an important part of your marketing? Obviously he’s a influential person in the food world but why that’s so key in terms of your story.
Umber: I think there’s an importance around authenticity of experience, especially with consumers. They’re constantly bombarded with new brands and new opportunities and it’s really difficult I think in this day and age to differentiate what’s real and what’s not. For me, very often when I’m introduced to something new, I look at the periphery of that brand to see sort of what’s associated with it, who comes with it, who understands it, and who’s sort of endorsing it, but endorsing it from an authentic standpoint and not from a hashtag sponsored hashtag endorsed kind of a thing. And with Tom’s encouragement and recommendation of me, that was a sort of, for me personally, it was a critical decision making component, but for me professionally it was also what I was called a stamp of approval. That is not to be taken lightly because I’m not professionally trained. I didn’t go to culinary school. But I think that there’s something very special about what I do. And to have somebody like Tom who is by all accounts and by every definition, one of the most highly decorated, highly acclaimed most, well-respected chefs in the world to look at this and say this is real, this is good and this is to be respected and to be had. I think that there’s something to be said there. And so I was honored to be given the use of his name and to be given an endorsement.
NY Launch Pod: So you had the stamp of approval, you started as an online business and then you had your first store front in Greenwich village. Why there, and what was that process like?
Umber: So when I started online, I wanted to be able to test the brand before I had a $1 million outlay of capital to build a storefront. First of all, just to test very humbly, does anybody even care about this food? It’s such a crowded market. It’s such a competitive business. Does this even matter? I also wanted to really figure out if there was an opportunity for me to stay in New York with this brand. People often say, you know, it’s a Frank Sinatra song. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. And there’s also an authenticity to building it where I live and where Tom lives. That’s also important. So when I started online, what I actually did is I went to all of my investment banker and private equity friends and I said, listen, give me your client list, pay for the shipping, I will pay for all of the food and I will send all of your clients gifts and let’s see if they order from me. I built a website and let’s just see if we get traction. And we actually got traction. I managed to get a couple.
NY Launch Pod: So you just laid out all the ingredients and you’re like, just pay for the shipping
Umber: Just pay for the shipping, I’ll pay for everything else. Let’s just see if we can get, and we started to get orders. I was like, oh wow, okay. That’s interesting. I managed to get a couple of really good wholesale accounts, including JetBlue, they had just launched Mint, which was their first class service. And so we started packaging little packages of pastries for their first class passengers. I got onto Williams-Sonoma.com And I was working with Intelligentsia, so I had a couple of things that I was able to do. And it started to build traction. Being online was really important for me because it helped me do a couple of things, get national exposure, build the brand, but also helped me figure out within New York where were my customers. And I found out that most of the people who were ordering from me were in the West Village. So that informed for me where I should be physically in New York City. So if most of my customers were on the Upper West Side, I probably would have built on the Upper West Side. But they were in the West Village and at the time Tom lived in the West Village as well. So it just made sense. So we built in the West Village.
NY Launch Pod: And you created a beautiful store, feels really relaxed when you walk in. What was that process like?
Umber: It was not relaxed.
NY Launch Pod: It was not relaxed, but you’d never built a store before, I imagine. So how did you do that?
Umber: I think, and I, I’m sure anybody who’s ever done anything construction-related ever in their lives. I think I made every single mistake that any human being could possibly make during construction twice and spent four times as much money as I should have and it took three times as long as it should have. But in the end I was really proud of the space that we built. It was for me a really good learning experience and it was also an opportunity to actually gut renovated space and build a kitchen from scratch. What was great about that was that we had a chance to figure out what we needed. It was also an opportunity for us to, for me to take my engineering experience and I was able to sort of work on building as much of a carbon neutral space as possible. So we took the air recapture system and I built it such that 80% of the heat that we generate from our baking goes to heating the space for the customers. So I tried to like do little things like that in the process, but ultimately I wanted it to be a haven. I wanted you to feel the Mah-Ze-Dahr of the experience, not just from the food and the coffee and the tea, but from sitting and just being immersed in my life.
NY Launch Pod: And whose idea was it to just give away the product and get the shipping to all of the private equity clients? I think that that’s such an innovative idea, at least in terms of getting your name out there.
Umber: It was my idea.
NY Launch Pod: It was your idea. And so it probably required a significant investment to invest in all that, those ingredients. How did you decide I’m actually gonna take this plunge and do that?
Umber: Well, I knew that I needed exposure and I also knew that I needed to test the brand because outside of, you know, my friends and family telling me that it was fantastic food, which was all lovely, but I’m pretty sure was cause they got free food from me. I needed to know if there was an opportunity for me to build this as a sustainable business and so having amassed some savings, being in investment banking and private equity for some time, I said, you know, if I don’t believe in what I’m doing, no one else is gonna believe in it. So I’m going to take a piece of my own savings and I’m going to invest in me and invest in my dream and let’s see if we can make this work.
NY Launch Pod: At what point were you like, I’m going to have a store, you know, how many sales did you have to you know that, alright, now I need it to have a physical presence?
Umber: That’s a really good question. I don’t remember the exact moment where I said, this is it. We have to have a store from the very beginning. I knew we had to have a physical presence. Food is a very immediate gratification thing. It’s one thing to get on a website, see some cookies, place an order, wait for it to arrive and enjoy them. But when I want a cookie, I want a cookie. I want it right now. So I knew that ultimately I would have to get to that storefront standpoint. It was really more a matter of a revenue number, having had a revenue number and amassed enough capital in order to build the store. I knew sort of that was the point in time at which I was going to be able to go forward.
NY Launch Pod: And you talked about building a sustainable business in the sense that it can sustain itself and grow, but also important to your story is the ethos behind it. And I think paying workers a living wage, you talk about recycling the heat earlier. Why is that important to you?
Umber: For me, it’s important to build a heritage brand. Something that has the ability to have longevity and longevity isn’t just I’ve been in the city for 20 years, but longevity means that there’s a sustainability to the way in which we live our lives. It is how we treat people. It’s about how we treat the earth. It’s how we treat each other, how we treat our workers and for me it’s about doing that in every single way. Some people say, I make a donation to a charity and you know, wipe their hands of everything else. And I don’t think that’s how things work. It’s woven into the fabric of our every day. So I think that we have to make these commitments in sort of every step of the way.
NY Launch Pod: And it’s obviously important, but I have to imagine that it comes at a more significant cost. And when you’re dealing with food and perishable items, you know, your margins may be thin, you know, what does that mean for your business as you’re going through that process?
Umber: It means it’s expensive. It means my margins are lower and it’s taking me longer to grow. It means that I make less money on our bottom line than other people, it means that I have been able to expand slower than other people that it’s taking me longer than I should have had a second location probably a year ago, but I’m going to have it in four months as opposed to nine months ago. Is that disappointing? Sometimes, but at the same time, is it gratifying to know that my staff has a living wage that we pay for healthcare and my staff has a retirement plan that we match? Yes. Does that mean that we work on carbon neutrality? Yes. Does it mean that we pay carbon credits? Yes. Does that mean that we think about the longevity of our brand in other countries and then we also are thinking about how to create food sources for refugees. Yes. That’s what we do. Does it mean that I probably don’t hit the profitability numbers that I want the year that I want probably that as well.
NY Launch Pod: And so you’ve talked about expansion and it’s coming a little bit later than you thought, but it’s still coming. So how are you going to keep that special aspect if someone walks into that store in the West Village as you expand to different places?
Umber: I think we do that. We do that through a handful of things. I’s the way in which we build stores. The materials that we use, the language that we use, the products that we use, the ingredients, the execution, the training, the recipes, all of that comes from the source that comes from myself and our management team. And I think that the more that we commit to staying on top of the way in which we build this business, I think the easier that it will be. I read a book very early on in my wanting to learn about this business. It was written by Danny Meyer, who’s the head of Union Square Hospitality, who has Shake Shack and all these other businesses. And he did..
NY Launch Pod: Also another small name.
Umber: Exactly. I know. It’s so sad. These people doing nothing. And he’s talked about the difference between customer service and hospitality. He said customer service is what you do for someone. And hospitality is how it makes them feel. And I always think about that and I think about our business around hospitality and it’s how we want people to feel, but it’s what we do for ourselves, how we want the world to be. So hospitality is what, how we want you to feel and how we want the world to be. And the more we commit to that, the more we’ll be able to expand a real business.
NY Launch Pod: So food is important in everyone’s lives and I think it’s taking on a higher importance as we kind of move forward and people love to cook. Why do you think it was you who had this concept and these wonderful recipes, why you?
Umber: Well, I don’t think it’s just me. I think it’s everybody. Everybody has these stories and these recipes and these experiences of themselves and they express them in different ways. Mine just happened to manifest in Mah-Ze-Dahr and others manifest in different ways. I think I’ve just decided that my legacy and my heritage brand is going to come and my ability to be a storyteller through this food. And yours is going to be through something different.
NY Launch Pod: And everyone’s will be through something different. Well that is a wonderful note to wrap things up on. How do people find out more about you and Mah-Ze-Dahr?
Umber: Oh my goodness. Uh, well listen to this podcast and then..
NY Launch Pod: Haha if they got to this part they probably have.
Umber: Haha exactly. So well done. You can find us online. Our website is mahzedahrbakery.com We are located at 28 Greenwich Avenue in the West Village between West 10th and Charles Streets. We would love to have you and we can’t wait to share a little bit of Mah-Ze-Dahr with you.
NY Launch Pod: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can follow us on social media @nylaunchpod and visit our website at nylaunchpod.com for transcripts of every episode including this one. And Umber, are you a super fan of the New York Launch Pod?
Umber: I am a super fan of the New York Launch Pod.
NY Launch Pod: If you’re a super fan like Umber, like I am a super fan of Mah-Ze-Dahr, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
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