Cologne When you step into Rewe on Kölner Ring, you feel a little like in a Japanese supermarket. Eat Happy’s refrigerated counter is full of sushi boxes, sashimi, seaweed salads and gyoza dumplings. The dishes are freshly prepared and rolled by employees behind the counter. “We offer authentic, high-quality sushi to take away,” says founder Christian Kraft. “You won’t find sausage sushi here.”
Customers can put together mochi ice cream from the freezer next door – from mango to matcha. The ice cream balls in the sweet rice shell are currently the bestseller. Payment is made at the supermarket checkout.
Eat Happy sushi islands can be found in almost 1,000 supermarkets in Germany alone, from Rewe to Hit to Edeka. There will be five new openings per week in 2021. In a further 220 markets there are sushi freezers that are freshly filled every day. The Cologne-based company has a total of around 2000 sales outlets in eight European countries. More than 4000 employees produce sushi. Sales should reach 370 million euros this year. Two years earlier it was only 180 million euros.
The Eat Happy Group wants to expand strongly across Europe – also with other freshness concepts: “We can do more than just sushi,” emphasizes Kraft. Mochi, waffles and frozen yoghurt from Sunnysu and vegan porridge from Supersu are already available. Supermarket islands with hummus, mezze and bulgur salads were added at the end of October. “Lovante” offers mostly vegan Levantine cuisine to take away. The concept was developed with an Arab-German restaurateur couple from Cologne.
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From investment banker to restaurateur
The Eat Happy founder came to the restaurant business by chance. The half-Iranian from Cologne studied economics in Passau and France and worked for many years in the City of London: as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and for a financial investor. During a hiatus, he helped a founder friend find growth capital for her coffee house chain.
Oriental specialties such as hummus and mezze are freshly prepared by Lovante in the supermarket.
(Photo: Eat Happy)
In doing so, he got a taste for it. In the United States, he had seen take-away sushi in supermarket freezers. With a college friend and a sushi chef, he was the first in Germany to place sushi in the supermarket in 2003. “We were earlier than Natsu Foods & Co.,” emphasizes Kraft. The Neuss-based family business is now considered Europe’s largest sushi manufacturer. However, Natsu does not produce directly in the market, but delivers chests.
That was also the business model of Kraft’s first company, Wakame. At that time he set up production and logistics for fresh fish himself in Kerpen. Rewe was the first customer, later the North Sea. “Big companies would have had much better structures than we did, but they didn’t believe in the sushi market,” says the founder, who initially made the sushi boxes himself.
In 2007, the French competitor Marco Polo Foods took a 51 percent stake in Wakame, and Kraft hoped that this would give it more clout. In 2010 he sold completely: “The business with 150 employees was nice and profitable, but it became too France-centric for me.”
Kraft had nothing to do with sushi for three years. Wakame and Marco Polo went broke. “Clear mismanagement,” said Kraft. In 2013 he started Eat Happy and bought his former sushi factory back from bankruptcy – with around 60 employees.
The founder of the Eat Happy Group wants to expand in Europe with freshness concepts in the supermarket: “We can do more than just sushi.”
(Photo: Eat Happy Group)
In addition to sushi chests, he is now relying on sushi islands as he knew them from the USA. The supermarkets provide the space. In addition to a fixed basic rent, they receive a turnover-dependent remuneration. Rewe has around 440 Eat Happy sushi islands. “We are extremely satisfied with the development of Eat Happy. The freshness of the products, the authenticity and the transparent production in our stores meet the zeitgeist and the taste of our customers, ”says Rewe.
2000 sushi chefs wanted
The “gastronomy of the supermarkets” got a further boost in the lockdown. “The food retail trade was able to gain strong market shares during the catering closings, which it will probably no longer give up,” says industry expert Axel Weber from the Soda Group. For Weber, sushi has a special position that is essential for success. “The products are highly specialized in terms of ingredients and production and are hardly prepared at home at all.”
Depending on the size of the shop, two to eight sushi chefs roll sushi in two layers. “All 4,000 employees are permanently employed and are trained on site,” says Kraft. Most of them have an Asian background and a high affinity for rice and fish. Eat Happy is looking for 2000 new employees this year.
In March, the Wakame sushi plant in Kerpen with 65 employees was closed – to Kraft’s great regret: “The pandemic working conditions did not allow productive operation and orders from discounters were lost.” A more modern plant for the delivery of chests opened.
Eat Happy has some catching up to do when it comes to employee representation. “Eat Happy will have a works council in eleven branches in the Frankfurt area for the first time – despite initial resistance from management,” says Peter-Martin Cox, managing director of the NGG Rhein Main union. The company has grown rapidly. With around 4,000 employees, employee representation is overdue.
Kraft, who holds the majority in Eat Happy, wants to expand further. With sushi islands, the Cologne-based company is already by far the market leader in this country, ahead of Sushi Daily and Sushi Circle. In Europe they see themselves on par with Sushi Daily, Sushi Gourmet and Snowfox, some of which use franchising or are owned by financial investors. With Eat Happy, the group is also already active in Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Austria. Research and development are based in London.
Ambitious expansion in Europe
Kraft does not fear a “Vapiano effect” – over-ambitious growth that ends in bankruptcy. The company has the liquidity to cope with the expansion. “We have been profitable and almost debt-free for a long time.” He sees growing pains in building the organization, however. Two managing directors from large companies left after a short time. “Strategically, we were too far apart.”
Not all plans were successful, such as those for Pokébay shops or their own delivery service. However, Kraft sees great potential to transfer the success of the sushi islands to food concepts such as the Levante cuisine. For industry insider Weber, the challenge lies in differentiating himself from what has been learned from Turkish and Greek cuisine. There is already competition from supermarkets, such as Green Kebab. Ex-Eat Happy managing director Hartwig Retzlaff started the Babacous chain with hummus and mezze.
Kraft sees enough opportunities in the market and has an ambitious goal: “In five years, the Eat Happy Group wants to be number one for ultra-fresh food concepts in supermarkets in Europe.”
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