Celebrating its one-year anniversary this April, Blanched is featured this week on "Negócios com Impacto" (Business with Impact), the podcast produced by Rádio Renascença in partnership with CATÓLICA-LISBON. This project was born out of the desire to be entrepreneurial and, at the same time, to create an answer for the restaurant industry and for those who want a career in this area.
Rodrigo Ferreira was 21 years old when, in response to an identified opportunity, he decided to create a project that aims to transform the way the restaurant industry connects with professionals in Portugal. As a job marketplace startup for the restaurant industry, "Blanched seeks to be a bridge between full-time and part-time job offers and people looking for new job opportunities in this area," explains Rodrigo Ferreira, CEO and co-founder of Blanched.
In the process from identifying the opportunity to conceiving the idea, Rodrigo Ferreira and Pedro Costa, co-founder of Blanched, benefited from the latter's experience in the restaurant industry after meeting at an entrepreneurship event. "We wanted to create a fast product, in other words, one that really made sense for restaurants and we initially thought of a platform based on the logic of facilitating restaurant shifts," says Rodrigo Ferreira. But, he adds, "when we got in touch with customers, we really realized that there was a bigger opportunity, and we decided to move on to facilitating responses to the needs of workforce in a full-time regime".
According to the former student of CATÓLICA-LISBON's MSc in Management with a specialization in Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Impact, "as a result of the impact of COVID-19, the catering sector was hit hard with a lack of workers due to people leaving the profession without many having decided to return to the sector".
By creating a kind of pool of professionals, Blanched has positioned itself as a business with impact, for a sector that is struggling with staff-related issues, such as absenteeism and/or the difficulty of finding qualified people. "With our product, which facilitates the hiring or supply of sudden and even unforeseen labor needs, the restaurant owner can free himself up for other issues that have more to do with managing the restaurant space, suppliers or stocks, as a result of the simplification of recruitment," says Rodrigo Ferreira.
Blanched currently has 8,000 workers in its database that member restaurants can access. In addition, Blanched already reaches more than 80 restaurant-related companies, in a trend towards growth, which is precisely why it is recruiting young people to join the sales team. On the other hand, and because this is a sector in which foreign labor is present, Blanched is also betting on developing partnerships in terms of training, so that, for example, it can facilitate access to Portuguese courses for foreign beginners.