Hasan Sarwar was in a Dubai café around 11pm when he noticed the pastry display was still full. He asked what would happen to the stock at closing. Staff told him it would be thrown away and made again the next morning, he later recalled. The exchange gave him a specific problem to work on. The shop had already paid to make and display the pastries, and potential buyers nearby had no simple way to find out that some might be available at a discount. Hasan Sarwar’s interview with The National
Hasan and his brother Omair had grown up in Dubai. They left to attend university, then came back to start careers in investment banking. Entrepreneurship came later. They eventually left finance to build Peekabox, a Dubai-based marketplace that lets people pay for unsold food in the app and collect it from a shop. For anyone weighing a return to the UAE and a switch into entrepreneurship, their sequence matters. They were already working in Dubai when they spotted the problem, and they spent months approaching retailers before opening the app to shoppers. The founders’ interview with Emirates 24|7
What coming back to Dubai gave them
The brothers returned to a city they knew, then worked in an industry quite different from the one they would eventually serve. The late-night encounter gave them a place to start. They could ask what happened at closing, then see whether the same issue came up at bakeries, supermarkets and other cafés. Hasan described noticing food still on display near the end of trading in several settings. Each setting offered a different version of the same question. What could the staff reliably set aside once they had served their regular customers?
Familiarity with a city can help a returning founder spot a routine that looks ordinary to everyone else. It can also create false confidence. Someone who knows a café as a customer may have little idea who decides how much to bake, who takes stock at closing or whether the outlet can put together a paid order after it begins shutting down. For the Sarwars, selling the idea required talking to the businesses that would do the work. Omair described trying messages, emails and cold calls, and told Emirates 24|7 that getting on the phone was the most effective approach for them. The founders on approaching UAE merchants
That is a distinction a returnee can use before taking a lease, hiring developers or leaving a job. Make one list of the people you can reach today and another of the people who would have to change how they work for the product to succeed. A friend in a corporate office may introduce you to a brand. A branch manager can tell you whether the closing team can pack an order while reconciling the till. The person who approves an experiment and the person who has to carry it out may see different risks.
Why the first sales calls were about supply
Peekabox needed something available near enough to collect before a consumer had a reason to open the app a second time. That gave the founders a reason to work on merchant participation before the public launch in May 2026. Hasan told Gulf News about the early difficulty of getting businesses on board while the company was still building. Omair similarly described the challenge of asking retailers and investors to commit before there was a live product with a track record. The argument to a retailer was that a surplus sale could bring in additional revenue and introduce the store to customers. Hasan Sarwar’s interview with Gulf News
At launch, the number of agreements and the number of places initially rolling out the service were different. Peekabox announced more than 1,000 stores signed. Emirates 24|7 reported an initial rollout of around 250 UAE locations. A signed store can be part of the planned network while training, local scheduling or other preparations still separate it from its first listing. Even a live store may have no surplus on a given day. The numbers answer different questions for a founder planning a launch and a shopper deciding whether to check the app tonight. Peekabox’s launch announcement Emirates 24|7 on the initial rollout
A founder testing a similar marketplace could keep three separate counts from day one. Start with branches that have agreed to participate. Track the branches capable of taking an order this week, then track those that actually post available inventory. The gap between the first two numbers can point to slow onboarding. The gap between the last two may reflect how irregular the supply is, or how much work the shift has to do to list it. Before trying to close either gap, ask staff what happened on the days when they had sellable surplus and chose to leave the app alone.
How the surprise box handles an unpredictable shelf
Peekabox describes a three-step flow. A customer browses nearby stores, reserves and pays in the app, then goes to the shop during the stated pickup window. Box contents vary. That gives a bakery some latitude to make up a box from what it actually has left instead of offering an individual item it may sell to someone else by the time the customer arrives. The consumer trades control over the exact items for a discount and has to be able to make the pickup. Peekabox’s product and collection guide
The same design creates a small operational puzzle. A store must decide how late it can wait to see what is left and how early it can give buyers a useful collection window. A box put up too early may be difficult to fill after a busy evening. List it too late and a buyer who would have picked it up on the way home may already be elsewhere. A customer who lives close by and likes a range of baked goods is making a different decision from someone who has to cross town and needs a particular dinner. Two branches of the same chain can therefore produce very different results.
The practical test is what happens between payment and handover. In a founder-led trial, record whether the customer came during the window, whether staff could find the prepared order quickly, and what happened when the branch had less surplus than expected. Listen for the questions customers ask at collection. If they consistently ask where to go, the pickup instructions need attention. If they repeatedly expect specific items, the listing may be making a promise the store has little ability to keep. Resolve each issue at the point it arises, then check whether the fix works on a different shift.
How the brothers divided the work
The founders described a split in which Hasan focused on operations and technology while Omair handled partnerships, growth and expansion. It gives a merchant question and a product question somewhere to go. It also exposes the decisions the two sides have to make together. When a prospective partner asks for a different pickup process, the person negotiating needs to know whether the product can support it. The person responsible for the product needs to know whether that request comes from one location or a pattern across different shops. The founders on their respective roles
A pair of founders could put this division to work in a weekly review of failed handovers. One partner brings the merchant’s description of the incident and how the shift was staffed. The other traces what the buyer saw in the app and where the order stopped. They agree who owns the immediate response and who decides whether the issue warrants a product change. If both founders take every exception, the business may depend on the pair’s ability to be available at closing. If neither sees the whole sequence, the partner relationship and the software can improve independently while the handover still fails.
What a box sale tells you about food waste
The UAE’s national food loss and waste initiative, ne’ma, sets a target of halving food loss and waste by 2030. It describes work on measurement, behaviour and redirecting surplus, including partnerships with food banks, retailers and hospitality operators. A commercial marketplace addresses one specific point in that wider effort. It creates a way for an outlet to offer leftover inventory to someone prepared to pay and collect it. Prevention, donation and commercial resale involve different flows of food. Ne’ma’s mandate and national target
Ne’ma’s Al Fina’a reel shows how the initiative brings food waste education into UAE community events.
A completed pickup tells a business that stock found a buyer through that channel. To estimate what the marketplace changed, the store needs to know what would ordinarily have happened to the items. A shop may already discount its final batch, donate a portion or discard it. A simple trial can log those destinations across comparable trading days, then track how much of the new listed stock is collected. Use the same unit throughout, such as weight of edible food or individual items by category. Keep cancelled orders and uncollected boxes visible in the record. If a manager also changes production volumes during the trial, note when that happened so the team can examine both changes.
What to test before committing to a UAE launch
Pick a part of Dubai or another UAE city where buyers could collect from several relevant shops on a normal journey. Start with outlets whose surplus timing fits that journey. Observe closing on both a busy day and a quiet one. Ask the person on duty to walk through how they would receive an order, pack it and hand it over. Test what happens when the usual contact is absent. A pilot run by the manager who approved it may work smoothly while the ordinary evening team finds the same process difficult to repeat.
Check the economics at the branch as well as the platform. A store might recover AED 18 after platform deductions on a hypothetical box and spend AED 3 on packaging plus AED 5 of additional staff time. That leaves AED 10 before other incremental costs or any effect on regular sales. If the box displaces a sale the branch usually makes through its existing closing discount, compare the margin from each route. The example uses assumed inputs. The useful work is getting a merchant to supply realistic inputs and agreeing who will absorb the cost when something goes wrong.
Give repeat orders a chance to tell a different story from launch week. A buyer can try a box once out of curiosity. If regular customers return to the same cluster of shops after they understand what the boxes contain and when they can collect, the marketplace has some evidence of a routine. Ask merchants whether they are still listing without a reminder from the founder. When uptake differs by branch, compare pickup times, local travel and listing frequency before assuming one location has less appetite for discounts.
The Sarwars’ route back to Dubai gave them time to notice a local problem while working in another sector. To turn that observation into a business, they had to persuade retailers to supply the marketplace and design a collection process that could accommodate an unpredictable shelf. A returning founder can learn a great deal by following one transaction through a UAE branch from listing to handover, then seeing whether it can happen again when the founder is somewhere else.
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