Business in the Spotlight: Local Spoon

by Xavier Parkhouse-Parker · Published March 15, 2017 · Updated March 15, 2017

This week’s Business in the Spotlight is an awesome award-winning growing business: Local Spoon which helps people get the best last minute deals for food! We’re interviewing Diane Florescu to find out more her business growth.

Local Spoon is the Snapchat for last-minute deals run by locals!

Tell us a bit about yourself?

I moved to the UK when I was only 18 years of age and I am the first in my family to enter Higher Education in another country. I have been studying for my degrees whilst working in various startups. In the past year, I have been running my own business, finishing my MSc in Technology Entrepreneurship at UCL and receiving the highest distinction across all Marketing Degrees at the University of Westminster.

Starting my own business has been the thrill of a lifetime, but it is also exhausting and filled with daily struggles. If there is one thing I have learned over these years it’s that good things are rarely accomplished alone. Success often hinges on getting the right advice or support from the right people. Despite all the struggle you go through to achieve your goals, it’s these ups and downs that will make me a great role model at a very young age.

Diana Florescu – Founder of Local Spoon

What is Local Spoon all about?

Local Spoon, the winner of the Lloyds Banking People’s Choice award, is an online platform designed to connect restaurants with local customers through last-minute deals and discounted surplus food.

Local Spoon is the Snapchat for last-minute deals run by locals! The application signals flash meals in Central London available a few hours a day only. We are offering a high variety of food options at the most affordable price in London where eating-out could be quite expensive. Local Spoon allows customers to quickly redeem any offer available in their proximity directly on the Local Spoon App.

Local Spoon is not a delivery service; everything runs locally. You need to wing your way to collect the food or you can dine in. Don’t worry about walking too much! You see offers available within a mile radius!

We focus on providing one key benefit better than any other food business – Offering a high variety of food options at the most affordable price in London!

Local Spoon

How important is your mission?

Our lives seemed destined to become ever more global. We tend to underestimate the negative implications of this phenomenon upon our local communities, local economies and on the quality of life. The average UK restaurant throws away 21 tonnes of food per year. That weights as much as 3 double decker buses, and even worse 75% of the food that is thrown away is avoidable and could have been eaten.

Local Spoon was deliberately designed to promote small-scale, locally interdependent production. We do not deliver food! We are bringing feet to our vendors. We don’t want to keep customers away from restaurants. We have been working on a solution to help local food vendors give the surplus food a second chance.

Traditional retail will be suffering dramatic changes. Brick and mortars will have to join the Networked High Street and use Big Data technology to pull customers in stores. This is where Local Spoon comes in! The more we understand the local markets, the better we can advise new businesses and existing clients about the retail space. The in-depth market learning will help us extend our value proposition to food feast and street food culture in the years to come.

Why do you think people make such great entrepreneurs?

What makes the entrepreneurs different from a group of professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom is how we approach the uncertainty and make innovation happen. Curiosity is the first step towards learning and novelty. Investors aren’t looking for a prosaic business model that will just make a profit. They are searching for a more peculiar business concept. The execution is key, but the idea also has to be a bit “crazy”. You have to show that you believe in your idea and that you are ready to go that extra mile to make it happen.

Local Spoon Brand Ambassadors

Why is word of mouth important to you as a business?

Local Spoon was designed from the start to encourage future viral growth. After testing the prototype with a small sample of users the most popular features were the “progress bar” which allows them to collect points when reaching certain milestones and the “sharing” button to send offers to other friends on campus. It is no good doing viral marketing without being sure that the MVP can benefit from it.

We plan to achieve a sustainable growth engine through an intense focus on establishing localised network effects. Companies like Recommendable play a crucial role in supporting new businesses get better exposure and achieve fast local mass.

We cannot be on every channel, in fact, this may create duplication of work, confusion and inaccurate results from a lack of focus. Local Spoon is heavily relying on community building and Word of Mouth to encourage our customers to think local first!