Digital Sales Director · Joined March 2026
FoodVessel: selling a marketplace to buyers who've bought the same way for twenty years
The situation
Institutional procurement in the Gulf runs on relationships and advance-payment risk. A first container order is a six-figure act of trust.
FoodVessel is a Dubai B2B food marketplace connecting UAE buyers with global suppliers, with escrow protection and logistics handled end to end. The growth question was Saudi Arabia, where 80–90% of food is imported and Vision 2030 is accelerating hotel, restaurant and catering demand.
The market conditions were ideal. The buying behaviour was the obstacle: fragmented supplier discovery, relationship-based sourcing, manual negotiation, and real counterparty risk on every transaction.
When I arrived
When I left
Relationship-based sourcing, offline
A digitised procurement path with escrow
No segmentation
Institutional catering and bulk distributors, split by buying motion
One generic entry point
Buyer and seller dual-path onboarding, now live
No defined first-order motion
A five-stage conversion model with named owners
What I built
The go-to-market and growth strategy for a two-sided marketplace, and a 90-day market-entry plan for Saudi Arabia.
A segmented ICP separating institutional catering from bulk distributors by buying motion, trigger and lifetime value. A positioning statement: FoodVessel enables container-scale institutional buyers to digitize bulk procurement while reducing transaction risk in cross-border food trade. A five-stage conversion model from lead to first digital sale, with named owners and per-stage KPIs. Lifecycle marketing, activation campaigns and commercial communications. AI-assisted customer communication workflows and CRM automation.
I also rebuilt the marketing landing page. The buyer/seller dual-path entry and the HORECA-led segment definitions from that work are live on foodvessel.com today: the production site opens with a buyer-or-seller choice and describes each side in the segment language from the ICP work.
The judgment call
Refusing self-serve for the first order.
In a marketplace the instinct is to get buyers transacting on the platform immediately, and that's the entire point of building a platform. But a first container order in this market is an act of trust that no interface earns on its own.
So the first order is assisted: an account executive walks the buyer through it, and the platform is introduced during that order rather than before it. Self-serve becomes the target for order three, not order one.
The metric that matters isn't platform adoption. It's the share of repeat buyers who stop needing help, and that number only goes up if you didn't force it at the start.
The KSA plan carries a full funnel model, budget allocation and unit economics. Those are targets from a plan, not results, and I've left them off this page rather than let projections read as outcomes.
Frameworks installed