Mahmoud El Wakil Lost the Competition That Gave Him His Idea. Then He Built the Company Anyway.
Mahmoud El Wakil entered a student business competition, made it to the finals on his own, and then lost. He says that loss was the best thing that could have happened.
“If I would have won, I would have never started the company.” Winning, he figured, would have felt like enough. The loss left him with the idea still unbuilt and a decision to make. He made it. That is how Homemade NL, a platform that lets home chefs turn their passion for cooking into a real business, came into existence.
From Egypt to the Netherlands, with a problem to solve
Mahmoud grew up in Egypt and came to the Netherlands to study at the University of Twente, the kind of quieter, focused environment, he says, that suited him better than Amsterdam. The original frustration was simple and personal: as a student, he was spending too much on food delivery, the options were repetitive, and nothing felt particularly good. He started asking why there was no way to order from the person down the street who actually knew how to cook.
He arrived in Holland as a business student with no technical background and no experience building software, and he is straightforward about that. His first version of Homemade was a Wix website structured to look like a restaurant with multiple branches, one per chef. He was teaching himself Dutch food safety law and KVK registration requirements at the same time. He figured it out.
The moment responsibility changed everything
The idea shifted from a student project into something else during the early pilots. Mahmoud ran a handful of chefs on the platform and watched what happened. One of them, a Jamaican student named Enrico whose jerk chicken drew consistent orders, was making around €300 a day cooking from his kitchen. Others were building real income. That observation changed how Mahmoud saw what he was doing. “If I stop doing this, these people stop making money.” That sense of obligation, he says, is what made the company feel fully real.
His parents advised him to finish his master’s, find a job, and take the safer road. He paused the degree instead and went full-time. The decision was self-driven, and he describes it without drama: taking that kind of risk is easier before a career, a family, and a mortgage make it harder to absorb. “If I don’t take this risk now, in five years or ten years, if I wanna start this, it’s impossible.” He went. He also brought his own stubbornness. “If you listen to everyone’s advice, you’re gonna be running circles.”
Homemade NL: the neighbourhood as the kitchen
At it’s core, Homemade NL exists on one premise: there is extraordinary cooking talent in every city, in every country, and most of it never reaches anyone beyond the cook’s own kitchen. The platform connects customers with home chefs cooking in their own kitchens, handling their own deliveries, and building their own food businesses. The model works the way Mahmoud describes the Netherlands working: bike delivery is practical here, emission-free logistics are valued, and the culture is open enough that ordering from a neighbour feels natural rather than strange.
That premise is now holding up across the country. Homemade NL is active in multiple Dutch cities, with Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht among the areas where chef and customer density is growing. In the past two months, the team doubled its chef count, and Mahmoud is direct about what he expects to follow. “I think we just solved the biggest issue we ever had.” Over 2,000 chefs have signed up recently. The team is around 14 people, distributed between the Netherlands, Dubai, and Egypt, and Mahmoud is being deliberate about the timing of a funding round, waiting for a valuation that reflects the company’s current trajectory rather than raising too early.
Beyond logistics, the platform is building tools to help chefs market themselves: automated social media posts, logo generation, menu design, pricing guidance. Mahmoud gives the example of a grandmother-level cook whose food is exceptional but who has no system for running an Instagram account. Homemade wants to give her one. The chef’s success is the platform’s success, and that logic runs through every product decision the team makes.
A meal is also a connection
Mahmoud’s thinking about Homemade was shaped early by something he learned as a teenager: that relatively small amounts of money, in global terms, could make a serious dent in world hunger, and that most of what stood between that possibility and reality was will and design rather than resources. He spent years involved in Model United Nations, believing institutions might be the answer, and gradually concluded the opposite: that businesses and social enterprises move faster and reach further than governments or international bodies. “What if we can make a business that can change the world?” He means it, even if he says it with a self-aware laugh. “I fully believe we’re gonna make it happen.”
The story he returns to when asked what the business is really for is about a man named Emra, a Turkish chef who wanted to join the platform but was living in a refugee centre and had no home address to register from. Mahmoud’s team worked out how to register the business through the home of Emra’s aunt, handled the food safety requirements, and got him started. Emra became one of their best chefs: building income, cooking for his community, connecting with people through food despite limited shared language. “The thing I’m most proud of is that the app is changing people’s lives.”
That is the version of Homemade he is building towards: a platform where families with restaurant dreams can test demand and build income without taking on the debt of a traditional launch, and where, eventually, expansion into developing economies brings the model to the places where he believes it can matter most. He is clear-eyed about the tension this creates with investors who may prefer higher-order-value markets. He is also clear that he does not intend to resolve it by abandoning the mission. “If money didn’t exist, I would say I wanna do it.”
Mahmoud is part of Forward·Inc’s Investor Readiness program and is pitching at Forward·Inc Festival this year. The business is early-stage and scaling, and he describes the current moment as the one he has been building towards: enough chef supply, a growing team, and the platform’s core thesis holding up under real conditions. Curious about what Homemade is building? View his investor proposition here.
Mahmoud is part of the Forward·Inc community. Learn more about Homemade NL and their home chef food delivery platform at https://www.homemadechefs.com/ or connect with Mahmoud on LinkedIn.
Curious about what the Investor Readiness program can offer? Take the next step with Forward·Inc.
The feature image of this article is form Vanaf links Santiago Letort, Gilberto Martinez, Jessica Woodley en oprichter van Homemademeals, Mahmoud El Wakil. © Lenneke Lingmont Vanaf links Santiago Letort, Gilberto Martinez, Woodley en oprichter van Homemademeals, Mahmoud El Wakil.
