How WowzaBox is Bringing Authentic Chinese Recipes to the North East
Living North caught up with Joshy Jin, founder of meal kit business WowzaBox to find out how he's teaching his customers to make authentic Chinese dishes from the comfort of their own homes
Then, in a push to reach customers further afield and break new ground in the meal kit market, he began to develop WowzaBox as a way for customers to enjoy restaurant-quality Chinese meals in their own homes. ‘If we can make everything fresh and if we can make everything the way we make it in the restaurant, but only leave in the cooking part so the customers have less room to make mistakes that would be great,’ he explains. ‘If you think about cooking, the cooking bit is only the last 10 percent of the time and the majority of the time you’re thinking about the recipe, getting the ingredients, washing them, preparing them – especially in Chinese cuisine. So that’s how we switched to WowzaBox.’
Making sure his easy at-home recipes were up to standard was hard work, and Joshy took it upon himself to learn from the best. ‘At the time I learned from really good chefs from China who were more than happy to teach me,’ he says. ‘They taught me everything and laid everything on the table. Those chefs were all at five star hotels, and in China often they’re cooking for wedding banquets or large conferences so they taught me how to cook for hundreds of people but still maintain the quality.’
Once the first meal kits were ready, Joshy and his team invited friends and family to try them out. ‘We asked a couple of people to come to the restaurant and cook it, and then particularly asked young students with no cooking experience to try, and the feedback was “I can’t believe I did that!”’
From there, WowzaBox began to spread and even managed to survive a major postal strike which halted orders being sent out. ‘In between we were driving for two hours and delivering a box to a customer in person,’ he says. ‘That was the greatest day at the beginning. We didn’t think we’d make it but we survived!’
Since then, Team Valley-based WowzaBox has gone from strength to strength, due in part to its unique way of teaching customers how to cook the recipes. ‘As well as giving a recipe card, we shoot videos on how to cook our dishes for online because a lot of people don’t know what to expect, and at the same time they don’t know how to cook it because it’s done Chinese-style,’ he explains. ‘So in the video you can see, start to end, a dish and that helps them to make up their mind on what they want. The good thing about videos is that there’s no filters so people know that’s exactly what they’re getting and that helps a lot.’
As well as classic Chinese dishes that everyone in the UK are familiar with, Joshy also wanted to push the boat out with more unusual dishes. ‘We give them classic dishes that we used to sell in the restaurant and we know people like, and then we also serve them dishes which are hard to find in the UK, but are popular in China,’ he says. ‘We lure them in with something they know and then push really hard to try something new.’
Of all the dishes Joshy has developed, does he have a favourite? ‘I have a few!’ He says. ‘I think Gong Bao Chicken is the one I’m most proud of and I don’t think anybody can beat it.’
