Our start-up story
My name is Shuai Zhang, I am the owner and Chef of POPRICE. I used to be a restaurant consultant working for my own consulting firm. I helped restaurateurs open many restaurants in the city. During Covid, I lost all my business and decided to build a Next-Gen Asian takeout concept for myself. I wanted to open a small restaurant that focuses on a limited number of dishes, aiming to make them healthier and cleaner. I also wanted to use technology to help with our operations. For example, I planned to implement kiosks and utilize third-party delivery platforms. So I took over an old Subway store that had closed due to COVID in July 2020. It took me four months to build out the space. I couldn’t find enough construction workers during that time, so I worked with the construction workers myself. I can say that I built POPRICE from scratch.
Business was really bad when we opened in February 2022; we were only making less than $500 a day. I was cooking, managing, and purchasing all in one, and it wasn’t enough to cut it. However, I was fortunate enough to have a good team to support me financially and emotionally—they all took a pay cut during my toughest times. We were constantly brainstorming to help with the sales. We changed the menu more than 50 times and developed and tried countless new dishes.
With all our efforts, business started picking up around September 2022. I was fortunate enough again to secure an investment from a friend. POPRICE opened a new ghost kitchen location in Brooklyn in October 2022 and a second ghost kitchen in March 2023 in LIC. I raised money in a second round and we were planning to open two more POPRICE restaurants in 2023.
Just when things started going well for us, our business was hit by a wave of major delivery fraud from a third-party delivery platform in the summer of 2023. Both of our ghost kitchens lost so many customers that we were unable to recover. The ghost kitchen company also laid off many workers, causing a lot of operational issues. Our food was not being sent out by their runners, and our ghost kitchens couldn’t operate because their computer systems were down, etc. We decided to close down the two ghost kitchens in November 2023.
We cut our staff from 20 to 4 and went back to where I started. It’s been a roller coaster ride for me and POPRICE, but I never lost hope. We will regroup and get back at it again in 2024!
