Farina

SECTION 1 — COMPETITOR SCAN 1. Supermarket fresh pasta aisle (Continente, Pingo Doce, El Corte Inglés Gourmet) — THE REAL SUBSTITUTE Who they serve: everyone in Lisbon already doing their weekly grocery run, including our exact target flat-dwellers. What they charge: a 250g pack of fresh tagliatelle or ravioli runs €2.20-€3.50; a jar of decent sauce (Barilla, Zeta, or the store's own "gourmet" line) is €2.50-€4. A two-person dinner assembled this way costs roughly €8-€11 total, zero delivery fee, available same-day. What they're bad at: zero surprise or curation — it's the same 6 ravioli flavors on rotation, nobody's cooking or sourcing anything special, and it requires the customer to actually go to the shop, which is the exact friction Farina is selling relief from. This is the substitute we lose to when we fail to prove we're worth the delivery premium. 2. HelloFresh Portugal — reci…

Farina delivers a box of fresh, handmade pasta and a matching sauce to Lisbon flats once a week, so a real Italian-style dinner takes eight minutes of boiling water instead of an hour of cooking. Each box holds two fresh pasta portions (250g each, cut that morning) and a jarred sauce made the same day — no dried pasta, no preservatives, no reheated leftovers. The pitch to the customer is simple: restaurant-quality pasta, home price, zero effort, same day it's made. The customer is a working adult or couple aged 26-42 living in the dense central parishes — Arroios, Alvalade, Campo de Ourique, Príncipe Real, Estrela — who eats out or orders delivery apps three to five nights a week and is tired of both the cost and the mediocrity. They have €15-30 a week of disposable food budget they'd happily redirect to something that feels like a treat but isn't a chore. Secondary customers are small offices (10-30 people) that want a Friday lunch perk, and expats who miss fresh pasta and will pay a premium for it. Revenue is subscription-first: a weekly box for two is €14.90, a family box for four is €24.90, both billed automatically every week with a skip-a-week option so churn stays low. A one-off box for first-timers is priced higher, at €17.90, to push people toward the subscription. Gross margin target is 55-60%: flour, eggs, and sauce ingredients run roughly €3.50-4.50 per two-person box, packaging and delivery (bike courier, €1.80-2.50 per stop on a batched route) add another €2.50-3, leaving €7-8 of contribution per box before kitchen rent and labor. At 150 weekly subscribers by month three, that's roughly €2,100-2,400/week in contribution margin, enough to cover one shared commercial kitchen slot and one part-time pasta maker. The first concrete steps, in order: (1) this week, rent 15-20 hours/week of shared commercial kitchen time in Arroios or Anjos (there are several licensed shared kitchens in that corridor renting by the hour) rather than signing a full lease — this avoids the €2,000+/month fixed cost until volume justifies it; (2) register the food business with ASAE and get the HACCP self-control plan filed, which is the legal gate to selling any prepared food in Portugal; (3) lock a flour and egg supplier — a local moinho (mill) for 00 flour and a nearby ovo (egg) wholesaler — and test four pasta-and-sauce pairings (tagliatelle with ragù, pappardelle with mushroom cream, ravioli with butter-sage, penne with tomato-and-nduja) with 20 friends-and-neighbors as free tasters over one weekend; (4) build a 50-person paid waitlist in two weeks using Instagram/TikTok content shot in the kitchen plus flyers dropped in the three target parishes, converting waitlist to first deliveries with a launch discount (first box free with a 4-week subscription); (5) run the first live delivery week capped at 40 boxes to stress-test the kitchen-to-door timeline before scaling the delivery radius. The near-term goal is 150 paying weekly subscribers within 90 days and a repeatable Tuesday/Friday delivery rhythm, at which point Farina adds a third pasta shape monthly and starts testing a small-office lunch tier.