Gilani Gourmet owner looks beyond pet food to a top Kenyan multi-brand

Riaz Gilani is a man who knows his meat. From a young age, he was taught to distinguish a cut of meat best suited to a barbecue from one that is perfect in stew.

It was a skill he learnt from his father who owned the chain of Gilani butcheries across Nairobi.

“I remember at the age of nine, in 1986, helping out my parents at our first butchery in Gigiri,” the 36-year-old entrepreneur says.

“I was very hands-on even back then. I clearly remember standing next to one of our butchers and making hamburgers. So the meat business is firmly entrenched in the way I think and do business.”

In 1996, his father — Abdul Gilani — partially divested from the business and sold the Gigiri, Muthaiga and Sarit Centre branches.

“It was a very good move because what we saw after that was the rise of department stores that had nearly everything a shopper would need, including meat.

“Existing butcheries took a hit losing between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of turnover because of the convenience factor. It was good fortune that pulled us away from the retail business when it came to meat,” says Mr Gilani.

But the link between Mr Gilani and the meat industry would not be severed even with the sale of the business.

So when he returned to Kenya in 2004 after seven years studying in South Africa, he started his own business within the meat industry — and that is how Gilani Gourmet began.

Initially, the business supplied pre-packaged fresh meat to delicatessen counters at supermarkets but six months later, he realised it wasn’t working.

“Most people go to the butchery and say I want meat for a barbecue, so you know what you are going to get without knowing the specific cut of meat,” he says.

But in a supermarket, he says, the one-to-one communication is lacking, meaning consumers end up getting the wrong cut. He decided to focus on products that did not require customers to have specialised knowledge.

He reflected on his father’s business and revived the pet food line. His fastest moving item today is fortified dog rice, a dry product that serves as the staple in a pet’s meal.

“When we started out, we’d be lucky if we sold a tonne a month but now we are selling about 30 tonnes a month,” says Mr Gilani.

At Sh121 per kilo, it is a significant revenue earner. But it is the pet mince that Mr Gilani has the highest hopes for.

Just a few months after launching it, he sells a tonne and a half a week at Sh125 per kilo.

Three months ago, he diversified  into cooked beef and chicken mince, which meet the needs of owners who don’t have time to cook for their pets or who prefer not to store beef in their freezers. He predicts it will become his best-selling product.

Mr Gilani’s next idea is to further reduce the burden of owning a pet by making home deliveries that will make him less vulnerable to the unpredictability of consumer purchasing behaviour and guarantee him a customer base.

Gilani Gourmet targets the middle and upper end of the market, who can afford to spend between Sh1,500 and Sh2,000 a week on pet food and who value pets as companions rather than for security.

His clients view dogs as an investment and as part of the family, worth spending thousands of shillings on.

In a residential area like Nairobi’s Loresho with approximately 500 homes, each family owns at least one pet assuring him of a large enough market.

“You have people buying expensive breeds of dogs — boerboel, bulldogs, German shepherds, boxers — and some of these breeds cost hundreds of thousands of shillings. I know someone who recently flew in Caucasian shepherds from Russia,” he says.

The experience in Western markets also suggests reluctance by owners to cut back on pet spending during difficult economic periods.

But Mr Gilani is aware of price sensitivity in the Kenyan market and has factored it in his plans.

“I am operating in a market where a Sh5 difference will push a customer towards a certain product,” he says, pointing out how a client prefers a 2kg bag of dog food because it offers a Sh5 discount to the 1kg bag.

With the success of the pet food division, Mr Gilani plans to strengthen the processed meat (biltong or beef jerky) and seafood (Nile Perch and Tilapia) lines of Gilani Gourmet.

But first he intends to distinguish the corporate brand — Gilani Gourmet — from individual products so the company is not only associated with pet food.

He is, inspired by Fortune 500 company Mars Inc, which produces chocolates like Snickers and Maltesers and pet food brands Whiskas and Pedigree and he is confident he can replicate the business model in Kenya.