Special Edition: Interview with Maria Abi Hanna
Owner of Food Label Maker
Today’s newsletter includes an interview Q&A brought to you by… Food Label Maker
Food Label Maker is a US-focused, user-friendly, and comprehensive platform for recipe nutrition analysis and label creation. By addressing the complexities and outdated nature of existing industry tools, Food Label Maker enables businesses to achieve regulatory compliance across more than eight global markets. The platform is distinguished by its modern interface, intuitive design, and cost-effective solutions.
The interview Q&A provides a founder’s viewpoint on critical business, strategy, and career decisions based on decades of experience in the food science industry. Key points discussed today include:
A unique perspective on completely remote work as a small business owner
Key sources of differentiation present and their impacts on business success
In-depth analysis of growth strategies and their effects on long-term value creation
👋 Hello friends,
Thank you for joining this week's edition of Brainwaves. I'm Drew Jackson, and today I’m bringing you insights from a lovely conversation I had with Maria Abi Hanna, co-founder of Food Label Maker.
Before we begin: Brainwaves arrives in your inbox every other Wednesday, exploring venture capital, economics, space, energy, intellectual property, philosophy, and beyond. I write as a curious explorer rather than an expert, and I value your insights and perspectives on each subject.
Time to Read: 16 minutes.
Let’s dive in!
Q: Background on Maria and Her Company
After graduating from the American University of Beirut in 2008, majoring in Nutrition and Dietetics, Maria worked in various capacities as a dietitian for around 8 years. Firstly, she worked as a Dietetic Intern at Saint George University Hospital in Beirut for one year, followed by another year as a Clinical Dietitian at Nutri Diet Center in Abu Dhabi. From there, she spent around 6 years at Right Bite Nutrition and Catering Services, a Dubai-based personal nutrition service provider, in various dietitian capacities.
Around the last 2-3 years of this work, she felt like she was reaching a ceiling in her abilities, as she was doing the same thing over and over again and was beginning to get bored with the process.
Credit Facebook
That’s when she co-founded a side consulting company called KeepEATreal. To quote their Crunchbase profile, “They noticed that while there were many dietitians who offer one-on-one counseling, few do so at a business level.” As such, they began their venture as a way to provide recipe nutrition analysis for Food & Beverage businesses in the UAE, working with restaurants, cafes, and food manufacturers to analyze their menus.
To accomplish this, they used software and platforms that help with the analysis of ingredients and creation of nutrition labels - the very thing Food Label Maker does today.
Credit Facebook
While engaged in this pursuit, Maria met her soon-to-be co-founders, who wanted to start a healthy food delivery app in Dubai, which they named Plotos. Their idea was that users could choose healthy dishes from different restaurants around Dubai. Users could input their calorie goal for the day, and the platform would recommend which restaurants and which items to purchase from for each meal.
The idea was good, but operationally and financially, it didn’t work out. As Maria states, “We were competing against all the very big delivery apps that added the word healthy to a lot of their dishes, and we needed a crazy amount of funding to be able to even compete with them anyway.”
There was the added headache of dealing with each restaurant, delivery drivers, and making sure order quality was maintained to standard. Ultimately, after around 2 years of building this venture, they decided it wasn’t the right thing for them to pursue.
After shuttering this project, Maria actually went back to the corporate nutrition company she was with previously, serving as a clinical dietitian again. She only lasted 8 months. In her words, “once you get into startups, it’s very hard to get back to the corporate world.”
Around this time (the fall of 2020), she was discussing her options with her husband. To prompt her thinking, he asked something similar to the following: “What service was the most popular at your consultancy startup?” Their most popular service was performing nutrition analysis for restaurants. That led to Maria remembering the tools she was using to do the work and what opportunities could lie in that area.
There were two main issues she identified with the current solutions on the market:
Many of the tools were very old and very complicated to use. If you don’t have a nutrition background, food science background, or technical background, it’s very difficult for you to use them.
Most of these tools were optimized for the United States market. The database of ingredients, customer support, recipes, and much more was primarily or entirely based in the United States. As she was based in the Middle East, there were often times when she couldn’t find the ingredients or information she needed about foods local to that region.
The solution: create a new user-friendly, comprehensive platform at a lower cost than current solutions on the market.
As this was during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she managed to convince her husband to help her out due to his boredom of being stuck at home. He comes from a sales background, able to complement her abilities in that area. And so, Food Label Maker was born.
Credit Facebook
Initially, they estimated it would take 4-5 months to develop the platform, but they lacked technical expertise. Luckily, they were able to find really good developers to assist them. It ultimately took 12 months to launch their initial product.
Post-launch, they wanted to engage in marketing the product to potential customers. But none of them had a significant marketing background. They started emailing a few agencies in Dubai to get quotations for a partnership. They came across an agency that specialized in growing startups.
The founder of a marketing agency messaged back and explained how he sometimes offers mentorship programs to interesting startups he thinks have real potential. This founder ended up being their 3rd co-founder. He traded a year’s work of the marketing agency in return for equity in their company.
Their initial ads launched across the Middle East. Within a month, they realized that the vast majority of their search volume was coming from the United States, so they quickly shifted their focus to cater to US-based businesses.
A massive reason for this was the need for regulatory compliance in the US. The market in the Middle East isn’t mature enough, so most participants don’t see the value in this type of tool as much.
Now, in 2025, they’ve analyzed over 200,000 recipes, helped users achieve compliance in 8+ global markets, and have over 10k active users.
In Maria’s words, “You need to start 10 businesses for 1 to succeed. I’m a big believer in that.” Luckily, she only had to start 3.
Q: What does your industry look like without including your business?
As Maria writes:
The industry is solid but outdated. Many of the major players have been around since the 1980s. They’ve built strong reputations when it comes to regulatory compliance, but their technology, interfaces, and overall customer experience haven’t evolved much.
Before Food Label Maker, the space was dominated by legacy tools; reliable from a compliance perspective, but clunky and difficult to use. Their way of dealing with customers also feels stuck in the past. There was definitely a need for something more user-friendly, modern, and responsive to the actual workflows of today’s food brands.
Q: Who are your customers and why do they choose you?
Currently, a majority of Food Label Maker’s customers are food manufacturers as well as restaurants, cafes, and food service businesses.
Originally, they were specific in who they chose to sell to, initially wanting something simple for individuals, small-, and medium-sized businesses. To assist with customer retention, they had one person handling both chat and phone calls from customers. And this model worked great for the first two years.
Almost by accident, they stumbled into the enterprise business segment. One of their biggest competitors was acquired and subsequently hiked up the prices for their software for these large enterprise food manufacturers. After being loyal customers for decades, these larger players started to look elsewhere for solutions, reaching out to Food Label Maker to see if they had enterprise solutions.
They didn’t at the time, but they worked diligently to build features needed on the go, now offering a large selection of enterprise options. Additionally, they had to change their sales model for enterprise clients to be much more high-touch.
Now, they cater to all sizes of businesses, whether that be a mom baking cookies and trying to sell them online, or a small food manufacturer with around 10 products, or the large food enterprises of the world.
Their customers gravitate toward them because their platform is simple, intuitive, and easy to use. Their interface is modern, and it’s designed so you don’t need any prior experience to generate a label. On the tech side, they’re agile developers, moving quickly to build the features customers ask for.
Additionally, they have a great support team to help customers with responsive, helpful, and consistently available help.
Lastly, their plans are priced to be more accessible and affordable, especially when compared to older players in the space.
Q: How do you think about your strategy for growth in your business?
As Maria writes:
I don’t believe in “get rich fast” approaches. I believe in slow, steady, and sustainable growth. We’re proud to be bootstrapped and growing organically. We’re not burning cash, and we’re building a business that listens to customers and grows based on real needs.
Our strategy is customer-first. We pay close attention to their feedback, and we prioritize building what they actually need. We also take our time to study markets before entering them—we don’t just launch and hope for the best. For us, long-term retention is just as important as acquisition. We focus on bringing in the right customers, not just any customer.
Q: You mentioned building the fundamentals of your business first, then scaling later as your preferred route. I’ve spent a lot of time in the venture capital world, where businesses build and scale simultaneously. What was the rationale for your choice?
In one of her previous startups, Maria and her team tried to chase funding. However, she pointed out, there’s no reason to scale if your product isn’t fitting the market and you aren’t 100% convinced of it.
For Food Label Maker, they’ve prioritized slower, steadier growth, which helped them make fewer mistakes along the way. They’ve listened to customers better and have rarely built without getting extensive customer validation. Features won’t launch until customers validate them.
In Maria’s opinion, slow is the better way to go, especially if you’re able to bootstrap along the way.
Q: How do you like being a remote team? Would you recommend it to other business owners?
As we’ve seen throughout the pandemic and since, remote work has its benefits and challenges. When Maria’s team began this venture, their team was small (fewer than 5 people) for some time. In that period, it was easy to connect and hard for anyone to shirk their duties.
Now, given their recent growth to around 14 team members, Maria is finding that it’s much harder to manage that many people remotely. Initially, they wanted to keep the organization with a flat managerial hierarchy, but now they need to add a layer of middle management to assist with the oversight of key personnel members.
Overall, however, Maria enjoys being fully remote and wouldn’t change anything. People are happier being remote. In her words, “As long as you hire the right people, remote is the better option.”
And, in her opinion, she’s hired the right people thus far. Everyone works as if it were their own company, with their heart and passion in it. A key portion of this is to decide quickly whether someone will fit the culture of the firm, with specific expectations from each person regarding the role and the culture.
To assist with the fully remote atmosphere, Maria has implemented a mandatory in-person team-building event once a year for 3 - 4 days. Everyone meets each other in person (sometimes for the first time) for tourism, team building, meetings, and strategic planning sessions. After these gatherings, communication across teams improves massively, and there is much more collaboration across the country.
Q: How often do your customers use your product?
The retention of smaller customers is difficult for their business model. Usually, they’ll have around 10-15 recipes for their business, which they’ll need to generate up front during the first month, and then won’t necessarily revamp their recipes for 6-12 months, so they don’t have a continual need to subscribe to a label-making platform.
As such, the retention rate of smaller businesses is not very high. People use the tool for a month or two, then disappear until they need to launch new or revamp existing products.
As for the larger enterprise customers, they use the platform often, whether it be food scientists, R&D researchers, Q&A team members, or any other employees jumping into the platform. Usually, they’re managing recipes, checking costs, analyzing moisture loss, and doing many more actions.
These enterprise customers have an extremely high retention rate, so Maria’s focus is on acquiring many more of these customers, as they have stayed with their previous provider for years at a time.
Q: What lessons have you learned from starting your own business?
As Maria writes:
One of the biggest lessons: finding the right co-founders is critical. You need partners who bring experience you don’t have, who share your values, and who think strategically about growth and decision-making.
Another big one: staying close to your customers. Their feedback should guide what you build. Don’t waste time developing features in isolation—talk to your users first and build based on their input.
Also, don’t rush into scaling. You need time to build a strong foundation and get the user experience right. Once that’s in place, scaling becomes much easier—and much more effective.
Q: What piece of advice would you offer to anyone looking into starting their own business?
Maria offered 3 pieces of advice, above and beyond what I asked for.
Firstly, she emphasized her previous point of finding the right partners/co-founders when beginning your business. It’s hard to go into business with the wrong people. Values need to align, whether that be moral, business, or other. The right co-founders need to complement the skills you don’t have.
Secondly, she discussed how you should try to make sure what you build is for a small audience first, before you decide to start growing. People often want to build things they want to build, without listening to what the customers want. This is a critical oversight and can easily sink businesses. Instead, it’s necessary to build with the customers’ needs in mind.
Lastly, your idea doesn’t need to be an attractive, out-of-the-box idea. Most successful businesses are ones that innovate based on what’s already out there - they do it better than existing solutions.
My Takeaways
First of all, it was fantastic to chat with Maria and hear more about her story. It was interesting to learn about her career trajectory and her strategies for building and growing her enterprise.
I want to thank Maria again for the fantastic opportunity to chat with her!
A Quick Aside on My Rationale With This Approach:
My goal in reaching out to Maria and people like her is to highlight that all businesses face strategic challenges at each step of the growth journey. In school, you traditionally only learn about the “best of the best”, those Fortune 500 businesses that have hundreds of case studies written about them.
Yet, there’s value in the unique insights from small business owners who are on the ground, constantly navigating critical decisions every minute.
How much do I price my product? Who should I hire? How should I expand my business? What do I do if my sales are down? — All are questions that small business owners face constantly.
Now onto the critical lessons I want to highlight from my conversation with Maria.
Lesson #1: 0 to 1 or 1 to n
As her very last piece of advice, Maria instructed people that you don’t necessarily need to have an attractive, out-of-the-box idea to start a business.
This is a perfect example of what Peter Thiel calls “1 to n” in his book Zero to One. He writes:
Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.
Maria’s explanation discusses what Thiel refers to as “horizontal progress”, a term that refers to copying things that already work in one form or another. It’s easy to imagine because these are realms of ideas and businesses that we already have a clear understanding of.
As Maria implies, it’s much easier to look at the world of business and commerce and think that you could do something better than someone else. And, there’s a massive need in the world to do so, there is no doubt.
However, it’s not necessarily the route to maximum, “unlimited” value creation. It’s much easier to dominate a market when you have no competitors than one in which you are directly engaging with and trying to defeat competitors.
No matter where you lie on this spectrum, it’s a valuable point to consider if you are thinking about starting a business.
Lesson #2: Slow vs. Fast Development
Maria emphasized in our discussion the benefits of slow and methodical development. Often, you see new founders tripping over the front of their skis in haste to scale and develop as quickly as possible.
This rapid deployment strategy can be beneficial if time truly is of the essence (e.g., the AI race in the fall of 2022). But, for the overwhelming majority of businesses out there, that isn’t the case (even if the founders would want to portray otherwise).
Why speed into developing a new landscaping company, a new utility company, a new bakery, or a new phone company? I can’t totally verify this statement, but I believe it holds under initial scrutiny: companies that are going from 0 to 1 (to reference the previous lesson) can and should prioritize speedy development and deployment, but companies going from 1 to n should prioritize slow and methodical development.
I think there’s a valuable lesson to learn here, which may have gone under the radar in your reading of the above Q&A: Maria started many of her businesses as side-hustles.
By doing so, you can’t focus your entire 24/7/365 attention on it, meaning that you have a semi-preventative barrier from overexerting yourself and too rapidly developing your startup. This encourages a more iterative and learning trial-and-error process, eventually resulting in, hopefully, a better startup in the end.
Sometimes the tortoise does win the race against the hare.
Lesson #3: Target A Niche Initial Customer Base
When asked who their target customer is, sometimes, you’ll hear overly ambitious startup owners naively state that everyone is their customer.
As Maria rightly acknowledges, trying to sell to the entire world from the get-go doesn’t make sense. Ultimately, your product or service is targeted at a specific niche group of people, those early adopters of your business.
For a local bakery, this would be people within the locality who like and often purchase baked goods, but specifically those who don’t purchase all of their bread from big department chains - you are targeting people who purchase from local bakeries like yourself.
Your customer wouldn’t be a businessman based halfway across the world. It wouldn’t even be the people in your same country. Furthermore, it wouldn’t, at first, even be people who were in the adjacent county.
To provide more insight from Peter Thiel:
Every startup is small at the start. Every monopoly dominates a large share of its market. Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. The reason is simple: it’s easier to dominate a small market than a large one.
Further, Maria’s advice once again proves valuable: to dominate your market, you must listen to and involve your customers extensively in product development and deployment. Validating demand before building can prevent overreaching and becoming siloed.
Lesson #4: Finding Ideal Co-Founders
Perhaps the greatest lesson Maria’s story provides (and she reiterates twice) is the value of finding the ideal co-founders for your business. Many times, you lack the entirety of the skills necessary to solely manage your startup by yourself.
As such, you may decide to go in with other people. But who should those people be?
Through her experience, Maria recommends finding co-founders with complementary skills and abilities. If you both have the same background/abilities, what value are you providing that the others aren’t?
However, if you have complementary skills, each person can provide unique value to the enterprise.
In an ideal world, you would want to curate a group of people that was simultaneously as small as possible (too many founders can cause decision and control issues) and had as many complementary and broad skills as possible.
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I just want to say another thanks to Maria, it was great being able to learn all of these things from her experience, and even better that I can share them with you.
I hope you read something valuable in the above discussion and takeaways that will influence how you approach business or even your life in general.
That’s all for today. I’ll be back in your inbox on Saturday with The Saturday Morning Newsletter.
Thanks for reading,
Drew Jackson
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