Afghanistan to Chicago In the Business of Food! w/ Heray Spice | [Interview]
Hustle Gurus is a series of interviews, videos, and podcasts for day-in-the-life content of Chicago founders, business leaders, and startup entrepreneurs. In this interview Matt L.F Smith sat down to talk with Mohammad Salahy, founder of Heray Spice.
Mohammad moved to Chicago from Afghanistan only a couple years ago. He founded Heray, a premium saffron supplier in late 2017 in an effort to create his own business over-seas while supporting his home town in Afghanistan by re-investing 10% of his profits into local Afghan farmers and school children.
“There are times that you feel disappointed. There are times that you feel really crushed, you feel really tired and there’s no sales for a month… but you just have to knock… you never know how close you are. So I created this list and told myself ‘every week, I’m going to knock on 100 doors of different restaurants around Chicago, in-person, to make sales and learn about the food culture. Some restaurants, the same ones, I went to 11 times. Since we started I think I’ve been to over 1,700 restaurants in-person. It’s all about the power of consistency and perseverance.”
— Mohammad Salahy
MATT: Can you introduce yourself?
MOHAMMAD: Hi everyone my name is Mohammad Salahy, co-founder and CEO of Heray Spice. Our mission at Heray spice is to help Afghan family farmers economically by brining their saffron to US markets, as well as helping children by re-investing 10% of our profits to building schools for Afghan children.
MATT: Every-time that you sell Saffron, how are you directly involved, on-the-ground in Afghanistan? Who’s building the schools and supporting the farmers when your money is going overseas?
MOHAMMAD: In Afghanistan, my mom and one of my close friends from high school are basically partners of my company. They literally go to the farmers and collect the Saffron from them, and then my business partner here in Chicago is shipping or sending things back to them in Afghanistan.
Almost every harvest time season I go to Afghanistan personally because I want to see and talk to the local community farmers that are working over there.
When I’m there, that’s also when we buy the school supplies for the kids. Last time we bought notebooks, pens, pencils, backpacks, and even blackboards for classrooms. Our long-term goal is to build schools within these communities.
Sometimes children have to walk up to 5 miles everyday just to get to school, so we want to help them in that regard. We want to build schools for the communities where the saffron is growing.
MATT: Talk a little bit about how the supply chain works. How does the Saffron get all the way to Chicago? How do you distribute the saffron to these restaurants around the city that you’ve built relationships with? How did you foster those relationships and pitch Heray to them in the first place?
MOHAMMAD: Once the Saffron is harvested and the flowers are coming out of the ground, the family farmers have co-oops where they come together and clean the saffron according to health codes, then the Saffron is collected by my mom and high school buddy.
For the first year though I personally went over there, put saffron in a bag, and came back.
MATT: What, what?! The first year you flew all the way, multiple times just to put saffron in your bag to then fly back?! That’s how you distributed your first supply?
MOHAMMAD: Yes, [laughing] literally. 35 ounces at a time.
Right now we ship the Saffron through FedX and DHL in bulk. Then we re-package them here by various amounts. We’ll take some samples to different restaurants where we try to get a hold of the executive chef, show them the samples, and let them see the quality vs typical saffron in the market.
Most of all though, they love our story. Our story is our strongest selling point. It’s not even about pitching the Saffron, but about how we help these communities. People want to be a part of something valuable, something bigger than themselves.
MATT: Who would you say is your target customer here in Chicago? Restaurants? Family kitchens? Grocery stores?
MOHAMMAD: Mainly home chef and high-end restaurants. The ones that are consuming and using more of the Saffron though are the restaurants.
MATT: What are some things you do then, to try and find your target-chef online?
MOHAMMAD: Google has been a very great friend of ours. We just search up lists of top restaurants around the city and if we can’t find the chef through the website we’ll look up “who’s the head chef for[restaurant]” and once I find the Chef I try to connect with them personally through social media, I think it’s important to make that personal relationship.
MATT: What’s the next step here then? Finding your perfect target customer? Maybe doing some customer interviews with existing clients, getting to know their needs? Or is it more of a scaling thing? You already have a solid business model and just need to figure out how to interact with more restaurants and up your marketing to get this in front of as many people as possible?
MOHAMMAD: Right now it’s everything to do with PR and getting in front of as many chefs as we can. I’m thinking about taking a trip to New York and a trip to California. I’m also trying to figure out ways to take advantage of the amazing restaurants that we already have in our portfolio, I mean, as of now, we have 1–5, the top 5 best steak houses of Chicago we’re working with!If you look up the top 20 French restaurants of Chicago… We have our Saffron in 11 of them! How to take advantage of that is important.
MATT: How long ago did you come to the US? How do you look at starting a business? What do you think are the most important aspects of getting off the ground in a brand new country like this?
MOHAMMAD: I came to the US just a little over 3 years ago, with $270, almost nothing. I found a job as a front-desk assistant with a real-estate company. I don’t think you absolutely need any inherent skill(s), you will have to work your ass off learning skills along the way… but it’s all learnable.
We actually started Heray Spice only nine months ago and didn’t even generate any revenue until 7 months ago. It was hard, but I had more flexibility so I was happy.
MATT: What did you do, what did you prioritize in those first 2 months to get off the ground?
MOHAMMAD: The first skill and most important skill you must learn in business is time management. You gotta learn how to say ‘no’ to a lot of stuff. It’s not about your to-do list, you should actually have a NOT-to-do list.
MATT: So what kept you going over the course of the 9 months?
MOHAMMAD: Never give up… I mean, I believe in that wholly, it’s not just something motivational. We haven’t been quite crazy successful yet, but I’m convinced that it’s all about the perseverance and persistence of doing something. I would have never been able to just go knock on the door of 100 restaurants and say ‘ok, I guess I didn’t get any business this wont work.’ I would have never made it anywhere! If a person wants to become successful on YouTube like how you want to be with Hustle Gurus, they should make at least a thousand videos!
MATT: Why did you decide to come to Chicago?
MOHAMMAD: My home town in Afghanistan is called Herat, and it means ‘The Windy City’ so when I was looking for where to move in America, I thought ‘let me just move from one windy city to another!’ [laughing]
Also, Chicago is a city of foodies, people love food here. Chicago is ranked #1 for where the most people eat out in the United States!
MATT: What are some of your short and long term goals for Heray right now? How do you see yourself getting there from where you’re at right now?
MOHAMMAD: By summer 2018 we want to be in at least 200 Chicago restaurants. Long term, we want to start bringing over different kinds of Afghan spices, there are a lot of other good products besides Saffron in Afghanistan. We are supporting 3 schools right now and we want to build 10 schools in Afghanistan by 2020. Right now we are supporting 21 family farmers, but we want to eventually support at least 1000 family famers, bringing their Saffron to the states creating jobs for more of those farmers.
MATT: Finally, because Hustle Guru’s whole goal is to help support other people’s work around the city, if someone reading this right now wants to contact you where should they reach out? Are you looking for any specific talent to grow the team within the next few months or any young people looking for internships?
MOHAMMAD: Yes! Its a pleasure to support Hustle Gurus and help anyone reading this article to use your skills so Heray can grow, you can grow, and our communities can grow!
On our website at HeraySpice.com, we have a contact forum. There, you can reach out! We’re looking for any interested interns for the summer of 2018 to grow Heray, we have a lot of stuff to do. That’s something anyone reading this article can definitely take advantage of. We’d love to talk!
I’m on Facebook myself very actively willing to accept friend requests haha! You can find me by searching Mohammad Salahy. I would love to hear your own story and connect!
MATT: Thank you Mohammad!
MOHAMMAD: You’re very welcome, brother.
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