For over 5000 years, communities across Asia, the Middle East and Africa have relied on the tandoor; an urn-shaped oven, often made with clay, that cooks meats, vegetables and a vast array of scrumptious flatbreads.
Today, these clay tandoors are a common sight in ethnic restaurants across Canada, but Omer Abdalla, BMSc '22, wants to bring them home.
For many communities, the tandoor is like a barbeque or a southern smoker. It’s not simply a cooking appliance but something that brings together families and communities to feast.
That is the mission of Abdalla’s Brampton Tandoors, which provides clay tandoors of varying sizes that are fitted to heating devices running on gas, electric, wood or charcoal.
After starting the company during the COVID-19 pandemic, and working on individual orders for people across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Abdalla - a natural self-starter - was confronted by some important questions. He had the receipts to prove that he was good at what he was doing, but could this venture grow beyond that? If so, how?
These were the questions that led him to apply to the Western Accelerator program.
Joining the program in September, it was his first formal education in the realm of business. For Abdalla, many of his greatest learnings have come through everyday interactions with fellow founders, who are all on their respective journeys.
Their questions, motivations and desires are like the fire in a tandoor. All of us are working together to accelerate our own businesses, but we still make the time to look out for each other and ask how we are doing. How can we help?
Making it stick
As a student pursuing medical school, Abdalla was always looking for new ways to sustain the gruelling educational and monetary commitments of his career path. Every evening, he would be spitballing ideas with his roommate, but none of them really stuck.
One day, Abdalla’s mom asked for a tandoor.
His first reaction was to jump on the web and scour online marketplaces, but he soon discovered that all the options were either too expensive, too large, or had long delivery times. Even the used market was populated with large and expensive restaurant-used tandoors that would have been a nightmare to transport.
If you can’t find a solution, you might as well build it, thought Abdalla.
Surely, there’s a way to make tandoors with simple flower pots? His intuitions proved right, and after viewing a few YouTube videos, he presented his mum with her very own, homemade tandoor.
With her glowing feedback, Abdalla decided to extend the experiment. He placed an image of the tandoor on Facebook Marketplace and found that there certainly was a market for it.
Soon he was travelling across the GTA looking for flower pots, but due to the ongoing global pandemic, many outdoors-related items were backed-up or sold out. To make matters worst, the hardware stores and garden centres didn’t have the best inventory systems, which meant Abdalla had to travel to individual stores to check on supplies.
I had to drive physically to the location, look around the store and sometimes they would have three or four pots for me to buy. Sometimes there would only be one cracked one and sometimes, I would hit a gold mine!
Fitting them all into his mom’s Ford Focus, Abdalla carefully transported them back home. After making and quickly selling another batch of tandoors, Abdalla was back out on the road again, looking for more terracotta flower pots.
Through this process, Abdalla received plenty of feedback from buyers and potential buyers; many asking for different sizes, thicknesses and shapes. As the tandoor ranges across a large geographical area, each culture adopts different shapes and sizes that are optimized for their specific cuisine. With these important customer insights, Abdalla decided to create clay tandoors and began learning a new production process.
Soon a new product and a new company was born, Brampton Tandoors.
Turning up the heat
As Abdalla works through the accelerator program, he is continuing to refine the business and product offering, while building up a network of entrepreneurs, experienced founders and mentors to help him through the journey.
For someone like myself, who is not from a business background, who doesn't have that hand on the shoulder or guidance from my immediate circle, it’s really vital to have people who have succeeded; those who know what they're talking about. And when they are coming to you and saying, ‘hey, fix this!’ ‘change this!’ ‘this is good,’ or ‘ this is bad,’ that's been really helpful.
From jumping on YouTube to find a DIY solution for tandoors, to testing products on Facebook Marketplace, Abdalla’s never been afraid to take that first step. In fact, it’s a piece of advice he passes on to all aspiring entrepreneurs thinking of starting a new venture.
“Take that first step. It’s the difference between being a founder and doing a regular nine-to-five job and never realizing that dream,” said Abdalla.
Yet in a world that is eager for acceptance, Abdalla knows the risks involved in putting your ideas out there.
Ignorance is bliss, right? It's better to think, ‘Oh man! I could have made it big with my great idea,’ rather than knowing that you didn't make it big because your idea failed.
Abdalla won’t die wondering, and he hopes his generation of aspiring entrepreneurs won’t either.