The Melianthos Journey: A Reflection on Challenges, Growth and Goals

Summary

In this candid reflection, I share my journey of leaving a 20-year IT career to pursue my passion for baking. Over the past three and a half years, Melianthos has grown from a small home-kitchen venture into a recognised premium brand, winning multiple awards. While I’ve achieved great milestones, the challenges of running a one-man operation from home are significant. As I look to the future, I’m exploring new avenues for scaling the business and bringing the flavours of Greek gastronomy to a wider UK audience. Below is an honest look at the highs and lows and what’s next for Melianthos.

The Story So far

I wasn’t always a baker. For almost half my life, I worked in IT, having co-founded two businesses back in Greece with my dear brother, Dimitris. Melianthos is my third venture (and quite a career twist!). As you may have guessed, I love building things from the ground up.

During my game development years, once a title was released and some time had passed, my team and I would do a “post mortem” – a detailed analysis of what went right and wrong with both production and reception. This is what inspired me to write this piece.

On January 8, 2024, Melianthos celebrated its third birthday, and the time has come to decide on its future. To do that, however, I have to go back to its inception. This is an honest account of starting and running a premium food business. I’ll share both the many challenges I’ve faced—some of which remain significant obstacles—and the accomplishments I’m proud to have achieved.

If you are planning something similar, perhaps this could inspire you in some way.

Challenges of Running a Home-Based Bakery

Every small business faces obstacles, but a one-man, home-based bakery presents significant challenges—particularly when it comes to scaling production. Here are some of the biggest hurdles I face day-to-day:

• The “one-man band” concept poses severe limitations, as everything is done sequentially, and context-switching disrupts flow.
• A domestic kitchen setup (space and equipment) significantly limits production capacity, stifling overall business growth.
• Lack of sleep and exhaustion during pop-ups and peak holiday seasons.
• Limited familiarity of Greek cuisine among UK-based non-Greek customers, which makes selling premium food products online a serious challenge.
• High-cost ingredients due to their speciality nature, Brexit, wars and climate change.
• Waste from expired ingredients due to limited customer order volumes.
• High transportation costs, especially for frozen pies, by post and couriers due to limited customer order volumes.
• Inability to hold stock of frozen pies due to a lack of space and commercial equipment.
• Expensive luxury packaging due to limited order volumes, expensive materials and manual labour.

Achievements: Proof of Concept and Growth

Despite these challenges, Melianthos has seen some wonderful successes, each bringing us closer to my vision.

• Validation of the UK market for Greek-inspired, premium treats.
• Improvement in KPIs year-over-year, up to fiscal year 2024, including annual revenue, average sale value, conversion rate (for online sales), and more.
• Distribution across mainland UK for the majority of products, including frozen items.
• Strong local ties in Manchester through pop-ups and face-to-face interactions.
• Brand recognition for quality and luxury, reflected in our premium packaging.
• Numerous Great Taste Awards and the coveted “Great Taste Producer” badge.
• Media coverage in both British and Greek outlets.
• Freedom to experiment, allowing Melianthos to introduce unique, high-quality food products to the UK market.
• Application of my IT and business skills to run this operation as a “one-man band,” keeping costs low.

Inside the Craft: The Melianthos Experience

A Culinary Mission Rooted in Heritage

When I announced during the second COVID lockdown that I had left my 20-year IT career behind to focus solely on my new baking venture, I wasn’t sure what to expect. After living in England for a few years, I realised that most people here didn’t know much—if anything—about Greek cuisine, let alone authentic Greek offerings.

Melianthos was created to introduce luxurious, handcrafted Greek bakes to the UK and, in the process, to help me, as a migrant, stay connected to my roots. To me, food is much more than sustenance. It represents life lived—fond memories from childhood when people gathered around a table to enjoy a delicious meal together. It’s also a way to create new memories and refine one’s palate.

My initial plan was simple yet ambitious: bake a selection of delicious products inspired by my Greek heritage, from my Manchester home kitchen, and ship them across the UK. I’d be working alone, using domestic equipment, aiming to offer an authentic gastronomic experience. For our customers, it would feel like having a personal chef crafting unique treats that create cherished memories.

In developing recipes, I blended traditional elements with experimental tweaks in taste, texture, and appearance aiming to create treats that feel familiar yet offer delightful surprises, even for Greek customers.

This has been equally challenging and rewarding!

Laying the Groundwork: A Foundation of Quality

I researched suppliers for everything—from ingredients and speciality tools to packaging materials. I designed a brand identity, set up a website, developed recipes, and iterated until I was happy with all aspects of each product. I took product photos, wrote copy, and finally, in January 2021, I let the word out and made my first sale.

From the outset, I aimed for Melianthos to stand out as a luxury brand offering a unique, artisanal experience. This meant choosing only the highest-quality ingredients.

Signature Creations: From Biscuits to Pies

Melianthos started with luxury biscuits, which are easy to transport. Soon after, I added hand-rolled filo and kouroú pies to the menu—a staple of Greek cuisine. These needed to be made fresh, frozen immediately, and shipped with chilled next-day delivery to ensure the customer could bake them on demand from the comfort of their home.

Later, I introduced tsoureki, the beloved sweet spiced brioche. I chose to make it naturally leavened instead of using yeast, which extended the process significantly—each loaf takes three days to make instead of just a few hours. While this enhances flavour and texture, it poses unique challenges for production. Stuffing each loaf with our fillings adds significantly to the labour time.

As time went by, I expanded the menu with new products and variations of existing ones and as of today, Melianthos offers over 30 items; quite a feat for a one-person operation. 

Breaking into the Market: Selling Artisanal Food

Although this venture started as an online business, the online format was quite limiting. Greeks in the UK were familiar with what Melianthos was offering, but non-Greeks were not, making converting them from website visitors to paying customers especially challenging.

I tested out the waters with local markets and pop-ups, which posed their own significant challenges but brought me and our products closer to the local community of Manchester. I met some wonderful people along the way, and I’m now happy and grateful to know that Melianthos is welcome every month outside our local cheesemongers for a pop-up.

I’m always excited to welcome and serve locals at our pop-up outside Chorlton Cheesemongers.

This allowed me to introduce new products that are not easy to transport by post and further explore my culinary creativity—an important aspect of keeping things fresh. At one point, I even had the chance to design the menu and cook for a private supper club, which was received with high praise by those who participated.

Accolades and Recognition: Establishing a Premium Brand

Melianthos strives to elevate Greek gastronomy in the UK. To increase our visibility, I entered the Great Taste Awards three times, winning a total of eight awards in the esteemed blind-tasting competition. Having achieved this feat three years in a row, Melianthos was further awarded the “Great Taste Producer” badge—a great honour that speaks of our commitment to excellence.

The esteemed Great Taste Producer badge.

These achievements brought media attention in both Greece and the UK, solidifying Melianthos as a premium brand with a higher purpose. Everyone now knows what to expect when choosing our delicacies, as is evident from our customers’ 5-star reviews for all products tasted, a record we still hold to this day.

But not everything was rosy.

Challenges with the Domestic Setup

Without a customer-facing brick-and-mortar shop has significantly limited my ability to offer our delicacies to those unfamiliar with Greek cuisine in the UK. Our online sales are predominantly to Greeks living in the country (about 95%), whereas at local pop-ups, 95% of customers are non-Greeks. 

This disparity highlights a key issue: it is far more difficult to convince someone to purchase unfamiliar food online—especially something as unique as a whole frozen filo pie—compared to offering them a taste in person at a shop.

Using domestic equipment for high-volume production leads to limited outputs and high costs—imagine having to bake 1,000 biscuits for Christmas when your oven can only take 75 at a time. This inefficiency drives up both labour and electricity costs, as multiple batches are required.

Working alone compounds these challenges. Without help, tasks are done in sequence, causing delays and exhaustion. This has prevented me from exploring wholesale partnerships, which can be an important revenue stream.

Packing our melomakárona tightly in their luxurious box is a time-consuming task, involving precise sizing of each biscuit and hand-cutting a cross-shaped cellophane sheet for protection during transport.

Packaging presents its own set of challenges, as each product must be carefully packed to prevent damage during shipping. For example, I hand-cut cellophane sheets (small, medium, and large) to line the luxury biscuit boxes, which adds significant time to the process. Furthermore, each biscuit has to be weighed to the decigram so that it fits tightly in the box—a painstaking and time-consuming task. Similarly, frozen pies require custom packaging that I make by hand, adding 10–12 minutes of labour per pie.

For complex orders with multiple items, I have to find the right-sized box and carefully arrange the products to ensure they won’t move during transport. Since my space at home is limited, I can't stock a variety of pre-sized boxes for every situation, meaning some orders require improvisation during packing, which leads to an additional 40 minutes of labour per order—time that isn't reflected in the sale price.

These limitations make it difficult to offer our products at lower prices, as labour-intensive processes and high material costs prevent me from scaling up without substantial investment in commercial equipment and space.

Each time I pack a filo pie, I start with a large cruciform piece of cardboard, which I cut down to a smaller size, crease, and fold into a box. This process adds 10–12 minutes to the packaging time.

Current Solutions: Maximizing Efficiency

To tackle some of these issues, I’ve worked to improve techniques and processes, and reduce labour costs:

• Designing special frames for portioning dough quickly, saves 60% of labour time, as I don’t have to weigh the individual dough pieces for biscuits and pies.
• Hand-cutting several cellophane sheets simultaneously saves time when lining boxes, though it's still time-consuming. If I had the budget and space for pre-cut sheets, the process could be reduced to seconds.
• Doubling the size of our kouroú pies cut down on production time while offering customers richer, more fulfilling portions. The time gained is used to make double the amount of pies.

These are more like hacks than long-term solutions, but they’ve helped me manage under my current constraints.

Our custom-made dough dividers save up to 60% of labour time by portioning dough evenly without having to weigh each piece.

The Road Ahead for Melianthos

I know our products are loved: repeat customers, top ratings, and industry awards confirm it. Melianthos brings something fresh and unique to the UK food market, even for Greeks living here. However, the challenges of scaling and becoming profitable remain significant. To grow, Melianthos needs serious funds for professional equipment and space.

My next step is exploring a two-fold funding plan, including crowdfunding and private investors.

I envision a proper kitchen with professional equipment, where my team and I can experiment and learn. I also dream of having a warm, inviting space where customers can visit, order their pastries and speciality coffee, and head off, satisfied. Regardless, I plan for Melianthos to continue serving the UK online market, bringing joy directly to your homes.

As we move toward this next phase, I’m eager to see where it will take us. With your continued support, we’ll be able to bring even more of Greece’s culinary treasures to the UK, one delicacy at a time. 😊

Thank you for reading this far,
Argiris