Diet Chef: healthy delivery service targets European success

Kevin Dorren has a lot to thank Denise Van Outen for. Last June she tweeted about the “amazing results” she achieved with his weight loss plan, Diet Chef, after overdoing it in Ibiza. By the close of 2011, Diet Chef’s sales had surged 33% to £15m. Of course, this isn’t all down to Van Outen, but a ringing endorsement from a celebrity with more than 300,000 Twitter followers certainly didn’t hurt.

Today, Diet Chef boasts 90,000 customers in the UK and Germany and is on course to hit sales of £20m by the end of this year. Not bad for a venture set up just four years ago with an initial investment of just £100, particularly when you consider that this is a market dominated by giants such as Nestlé-owned Nutrisystem, diet guru Jenny Craig and WeightWatchers. So how has Diet Chef founder and CEO Dorren done it? And how will he sustain this rapid growth?

The idea is simple: calorie-counted meals delivered direct to dieters’ doors for as little as £5.57 a day. The eureka moment came in 2007 during a focus group quizzing people about their ideal type of diet. “One of the group members said they wanted to be like Madonna and have their own chef. A lightbulb went on in my head,” says Dorren, the former boss of a software company and one-time private chef for the Mountbatten family.

At the time no other diet company delivered food direct to customers in the UK, so Dorren and business partner Andrew Veitch, an internet entrepreneur, began their mission to be the first. Now dieters can choose from 104 chef-prepared meals and snacks -including Treacle and Pecan Granola for breakfast, Sweet Potato and Coconut Soup for lunch and Macaroni Cheese for dinner - which can be microwaved or heated on the hob.

“Easy peasy”, as one satisfied customer testifies on the company’s website, which provides a wealth of online support including access to forums in which customers can talk to fellow dieters. Diet advisors are also on hand either via email or over the phone to help keep them on the straight and narrow. It’s this combination of convenience and support that is responsible for the company’s success, according to its founder.

“When you embark on a diet it’s hard to count calories,” says Dorren. “We conveniently put it all together and deliver it all to you. For a customer who wants to lose weight that’s quite compelling. We’ve done all the hard work for them. We use Facebook and Twitter to get feedback. We really try and engage with the customers. Twenty-five per cent of new customers come from word of mouth.”

Word is indeed spreading. After launching Diet Chef in Germany in 2011, Dorren now has his sights set on entering France before the end of 2012 and becoming a dominant force in European dieting. That’s a tall order, given the size of the competition, but Dorren is confident he can do it. “Although we’re successful we’re not a household name,” he says. “We want to grow as aggressively as we can and we want to be the market leader in Europe.”

A few more tweets from Van Outen surely wouldn’t go amiss. But it’s not vital, insists Dorren. “We want our customers, whether famous or not, to feel like they are a celebrity,” he says. “Diet companies do use celebrities to endorse their service but we haven’t. I really think our customers are our celebrities”. One of them certainly is.