The Meal-Kit Mogul

UCook’s David Torr shares his recipe for success.

- Sue Segar

HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN EXPELLED from several posh schools, been a marijuana dealer at 17, cut off from his trust fund in his twenties – and voted by his classmates at the Red and Yellow School as the person most likely to go to jail, but David Torr, CEO and co-founder of South Africa’s largest meal-kit provider, UCook, was grinning from ear to exhausted ear when we met.

By the time you read this the company, founded by Torr and his friend Chris Verster Cohen in 2015 after they had met in Thailand, will be well on their way to opening their first unique flagship retail store at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront – “in a prime location near Woolworths”. They will be selling an assortment of dinner kits and other ready-made meal products. Besides getting into the retail sector, UCook will, in June, also launch a range of ready-made meals online.

The company, which delivers convenient, healthy dinner kits with easy-to-follow recipe cards, started off with Torr and friends packing meal ingredients into boxes from a garage in Cape Town. (They once sent off the kits without the recipes, he recalls.) The business had reached a turnover of close to R100 million by the end of last year.

At the time of going to press, UCook had just emerged from a series of “long and laborious negotiations” with three of the country’s top retailers with a view to providing a range of products to one of them – a deal that would have seen UCook’s ready made meals and other ethically produced goods expanded to about 150 stores over the next few years. But in a phonecall just before deadline, Torr told