Empanacombi is a company in the gastronomy sector dedicated to the production and sale of empanadas (turnovers), whose proposal of value is to include in its labor force persons with some type of different skill.
After the sanitary alert declared due to COVID-19, the company had to stop its operations for two months and a half. Consequently, during this period they had no income to facilitate payments to their personnel. This notwithstanding, its leaders, Carlos Sánchez and Cinthya Rodríguez, created strategies that allowed them to avoid reducing their payroll and to continue providing the corresponding salary to their workers.
Carlos Sánchez tells us more about the current situation of Empanacombi. For example, what were the strategies that he followed in order to achieve the aforementioned objective. The first one was to design the pre-sale campaign labeled “Las empanadas del futuro” (“Empanadas of the future”).
“This campaign consisted in offering to our public empanadas, or any product from our menu, and that they could help us and pay us at that moment, so that, later, once the quarantine was over, we would ship the order”, he said.
The acceptance of the campaign was considerable and allowed Empanacombi to receive messages of encouragement from its public, aside from the income that they needed in order to meet the payroll, one of the priorities of his company as an inclusive business:
“We had to maintain a certain
coherence in our proposal of value, which is precisely to give work to persons with
disabilities, and we couldn’t leave them without income”, he said.
Empanadas that are reinvented
In addition to the previous strategy, there was also the development of new products in order to increase the company’s gastronomical offer. Thus, aside from the empanadas, now Empanacombi also offers a greater variety of products, such as artisanal breads, pre-baked doughs and sweets, among others, which they distribute at their shops in Jockey Plaza Mall and their shop located in the district of Breña, aside from their B2B clients, such as the Repsol gas stations, and the shops that, little by little, it has been possible to reactivate.
The third strategy followed by the Empanacombi team was to open its virtual store at: https://www.empanacombi.com/, aimed at the end-consumer and which has a solid, friendly and intuitive design that allows the easy acquisition of products from the brand, which are distributed by delivery throughout Metropolitan Lima.
“Thanks to these three strategies, we were able to preserve the business and maintain the employment of the persons with disabilities who work with us. None of them has been laid off”, remarked Carlos.
The support from the Entrepreneur Fund of Wiese Foundation to Empanacombi
Empanacombi, together with three other sustainable undertakings, were chosen to receive consultancy and financing from the Entrepreneur Fund, a program created by Wiese Foundation.
“For us, it has been a great relief to have the support from the Wiese Foundation in the midst of the current context. We are receiving the mentorship through Renato Peralta. He is a giant in gastronomic issues and we have meetings with him via Zoom, once a week. The meetings are beneficial for us because he is giving us valuable advice”. Sánchez ended the interview by encouraging entrepreneurs to bet on having a social and environmental impact: “We have already plundered much of our planet, and we have excluded many people. It is time to repair this damage, and, for starters, we must surround ourselves with a good team”, he concluded.
