About

The takeaway brands I built and ran

Three food brands across two shops, built and run with my own money on the line. Everything I say about where a takeaway loses money, I learned by losing it.

sales in a quarter that annualised to about £1.5M: £368k
delivery orders handled: 44,000+
brands built and run: 3
years in my own kitchens: four working, four running: 8

The short version

The family trade

My family have run takeaways and restaurants across the UK and Turkey for decades — nearly everyone owns a shop, or several. I started working in one at sixteen. Twenty years of family kitchens, and eight of my own — four working in them, four running them.

I built and ran three brands across two shops: Millennium Pizza, a twenty-year-old local takeaway I came into and rebuilt; Dirty Burger & Wings, a second brand I put inside Millennium's kitchen; and Movie Snacks, a dessert delivery business I started from nothing in 2021.

I also built Grubie, a platform connecting home cooks with customers, and sold it. So this isn't the first thing I've built that wasn't a kitchen.

I'm not behind that counter any more — and the reason I left is the reason this business exists at all.

The brands

Three takeaway brands

Millennium Pizza

Established local takeaway · rebuilt from early 2023

A twenty-year-old local institution running on instinct rather than systems. I rebuilt the kitchen layout, put EPOS, kitchen screens and kiosks across every station, modernised the menu and the customer experience, and pulled ordering into one place across Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Just Eat and direct.

I never had time to cost the Millennium menu properly — most prices were a guess. Average order went from £25 to £30 mostly because we moved the free-item threshold from £25 to £30, with price rises, upsells and better food and service behind it. It was only when I costed a menu to the penny later that I saw how much I’d been guessing. That’s the gap Telvo closes.

revenue, in twelve months: +18.5%
revenue, up from £887k: £1.05M
weekly orders, 756 to 848, no paid marketing: +12.2%
on Just Eat, from 109+ reviews: 4.42 / 5

Dirty Burger & Wings

Second brand · same kitchen, same staff, same shift

A second concept built inside Millennium's existing kitchen — two profitable brands out of one site without doubling the overheads. Tighter prep standards, hygiene controls and service discipline layered on top of the systems work already done next door.

The rating is the number I'm proudest of: 2.8 to 4.0 on Google in a year.

Google rating, over twelve months: 2.8 → 4.0★
on Deliveroo, year on year: +213%
annual run rate: £166k
brands out of one kitchen: 2

Movie Snacks

Dessert delivery · built from scratch, 2021

Freshly-popped popcorn in odd flavours, with churros, mocktails, sweets and brownies alongside it — the popcorn was the hook, the rest was there to lift the basket. Every product costed to the penny, branded packaging end to end, and no separate shop rent.

It also taught me the lesson the hard way: I launched on my own website first and it struggled. Going multi-platform is what made it work. That's the same argument I now make in reverse — the apps get you found, your own channel is where you keep the money.

orders a day, within three months: 20+
delivery platforms, plus direct: 3
separate shop rent: £0
built and launched from nothing: 2021

At the peak, Millennium and Dirty Burger together did £367,842 in sales across 12,576 orders in a single quarter, every channel counted — a quarter that annualised to about £1.5M.

The other half of it

Aircraft engineering, before kitchens

I hold a degree in aircraft maintenance engineering, and I spent years optimising production systems for the likes of EasyJet, Nissan and SharkNinja before food became the whole job.

A kitchen at peak is a production line with a bottleneck, a queue and a variance problem, and it responds to exactly the same questions: where does the work pile up, what gets done twice, what does the person at the pass have to walk to get.

A line that only performs when the owner is standing in it has a design problem, and design problems have fixes.

Find the bottleneck first Speeding up anything that isn't the constraint just makes a longer queue in front of it.
Measure before you change
Consistency beats brilliance The Tuesday lunch has to come out the same as the Saturday night, without you there.

Why I'm not there any more

Leaving Millennium and Dirty Burger

Because I couldn't stay. We'd agreed to take alcohol and cigarettes off the shelves. When it came to the vote, my partners went the other way. I take my religion seriously and I wasn't willing to sell either, so I left.

It's why I only work with halal businesses that don't sell alcohol, tobacco or vapes — I'm not asking anyone to hold a line I wasn't prepared to hold myself.

It cost me a business. I'd make the same call again.

Where that line sits

What I'm doing now

Why I built Telvo

I ran two sites for years without knowing which item on my menu made the most margin, or whether the promos and platform ads I was running were paying for themselves at all. I had a guess at both. They were guesses.

Nothing in a takeaway tells you. The information is spread across bank statements, four platform dashboards and a pile of supplier invoices in a drawer, and no tool I could find would pull it together for a business shaped like mine.

So I'm building it. And for operators who'd rather someone stood in the kitchen with them, I still do that too.

The software Invoice photo to item cost to per-channel margin. Book a demo. A day in your kitchen On site through a busy service, then a written plan. Priced per job.

A day in your kitchen

Thirty minutes on the phone, free. If there's money to find in your numbers, I'll tell you where I'd look first.

Book the free call See the software