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Product Marketing & Digital Sales Director · Dubai · March–July 2026

FoodVessel: selling a marketplace to buyers who've bought the same way for twenty years.

SECTOR

B2B food marketplace

STAGE

Scaleup, entering a second market

MARKET

UAE, entering Saudi Arabia

ROLE

Product Marketing & Digital Sales Director

PERIOD

March–July 2026

SIDES

Buyers and sellers

COMPANY

foodvessel.com
MarketplacesFood & Trade

The situation

Institutional procurement in the Gulf runs on relationships and advance-payment risk. A first container order is a six-figure act of trust.

FoodVessel is a Dubai B2B food marketplace connecting UAE buyers with global suppliers, with escrow protection and logistics handled end to end. The growth question was Saudi Arabia, where 80–90% of food is imported and Vision 2030 is accelerating hotel, restaurant and catering demand.

The market conditions were ideal. The buying behaviour was the obstacle: fragmented supplier discovery, relationship-based sourcing, manual negotiation, and real counterparty risk on every transaction.

01 · What this engagement produced

8 of 34 outputs

Research

Competition

Segment, position and price

Message

Launch and enable

Measure and maintain

Solid is what this engagement actually produced. Dashed is what it did not reach.

02 · The diagnosis

A first container order is a six-figure act of trust with a stranger.

Everything about the market conditions said this should work. Around 80 to 90% of Saudi Arabia's food is imported, Vision 2030 is expanding hotels, restaurants and catering, and procurement is fragmented, manual and relationship-led. The obstacle was never demand. It was that a buyer placing a first order through a platform is wiring a six-figure sum to a supplier they have never met, in a market where advance-payment risk is endemic and where the existing solution is a relationship built over years. No interface earns that on its own.

03 · The mandate

Own go-to-market for both sides, and open Saudi Arabia.

FoodVessel connects UAE buyers with global food suppliers, with escrow protection and logistics handled end to end. I joined to run go-to-market and growth across both sides of the marketplace, and to build the plan for entry into Saudi Arabia. A two-sided marketplace has two funnels, two value propositions and two onboarding problems. Neither works without the other, and the sequencing between them is the whole job.

2

Marketplace sides

buyers and sellers, separate funnels

4

Buyer segments

HORECA, distributors, manufacturers, retailers

KSA

Market entry

Riyadh and Jeddah

04 · When I arrived, when I left

When I arrived

When I left

Relationship-based sourcing, offline

A digitised procurement path with escrow

No segmentation

Four buyer segments split by buying motion

One generic entry point

Buyer and seller dual-path onboarding, live in production

No defined first-order motion

A five-stage conversion model with named owners

Content as marketing

Seven working tools that answer real trade questions

One market

A 90-day plan for the second

05 · What I built

6 workstreams

Six workstreams, across two sides and two markets.

01Segmentation and ICPFour buyer types, separated by how they buy rather than what they buy.

01 Research · 03 Segment, position & price

  • HORECA, distributors, manufacturers and retailers, each with a different order rhythm, basket and risk tolerance
  • Institutional catering and bulk distribution separated by buying motion, trigger and lifetime value
  • Twelve product categories mapped against segment demand
  • A parallel seller-side profile, because supply and demand have to be recruited in the right order
02Positioning and the trust architectureThe product is the reduction of counterparty risk.

03 Segment, position & price · 04 Message

  • Positioning statement built around digitising bulk procurement while reducing transaction risk in cross-border food trade
  • Escrow made a headline feature rather than a payments detail, with its own page and its own narrative
  • Buyer and seller dual-path entry, so neither side reads the other's argument first
  • Quality inspection, documentation and logistics presented as part of the trust case
03The Saudi Arabia entry planA 90-day market-entry plan for a market that is not the UAE.

03 Segment, position & price · 05 Launch & enable

  • Riyadh and Jeddah as the beachhead cities
  • A KSA-specific argument: global supplier access without the travel and relationship overhead, escrow against advance-payment risk, and Halal and customs documentation handled
  • A dedicated account executive model with an assisted first order rather than self-serve
  • Full funnel model, budget allocation and unit economics behind it
04Seven tools instead of seven blog postsThe acquisition strategy: be useful before you are trusted.

05 Launch & enable

  • A landed cost calculator
  • A container fill optimiser
  • A supplier scorecard
  • An RFQ generator
  • A perishable safety-stock planner
  • A cold chain risk estimator
  • A compliance checklist builder
  • Each one answers a question a food importer actually has, works without an account, and demonstrates that the platform understands the trade

Seven tools, no sign-up

Landed cost calculator

What will this actually cost me?

Container fill optimiser

Am I shipping air?

Supplier scorecard

Is this supplier any good?

RFQ generator

Am I asking for the right thing?

Safety stock planner

How much do I hold?

Cold chain risk estimator

What could spoil?

Compliance checklist

Will this clear customs?

Useful before trusted. Every tool works without an account.

05Lifecycle across the channel buyers actually useIn this market that channel is WhatsApp, not email.

04 Message · 05 Launch & enable

  • A ten-card WhatsApp sequence running hook, pain, solution, pricing, availability, tracking, proof, how it works, trust and call to action
  • Nurture flows for welcome, quick quote, product alerts, proof, credit terms and re-engagement
  • Product broadcast templates per category
  • Six order-management email flows covering standard, consolidated, credit, and partial-credit orders
  • Error handling for the automated agent, because a broken bot in a trust business costs more than no bot
06Operating cadence and seller operationsThe unglamorous half that decides whether any of it holds.

06 Measure & maintain

  • A five-stage conversion model from lead to first digital sale with named owners and per-stage KPIs
  • Weekly commercial updates with funnel analysis and lead-source attribution
  • A seller price-expiry standard operating procedure
  • Seller image and listing standards, because a marketplace's credibility is the worst photograph on it
  • A documented end-to-end test transaction, run and reported before asking a real buyer to trust the flow

06 · The judgment call

Refusing self-serve for the first order.

In a marketplace the instinct is to get buyers transacting on the platform immediately, and that's the entire point of building a platform. But a first container order in this market is an act of trust that no interface earns on its own.

So the first order is assisted: an account executive walks the buyer through it, and the platform is introduced during that order rather than before it. Self-serve becomes the target for order three, not order one.

The metric that matters isn't platform adoption. It's the share of repeat buyers who stop needing help, and that number only goes up if you didn't force it at the start.

The first order is assisted. The third isn't.

Order 1

Assisted

Account executive led

An account executive walks the buyer through it. The platform is introduced during the order, not before it.

Order 2

Supported

Buyer leads, we're on hand

Escrow and inspection do the reassuring.

Order 3

Self-serve

The target

Reached because trust was earned.

The metric isn't platform adoption. It's the share of repeat buyers who stop needing help.

07 · What this proves

Five things this case establishes.

I build the go-to-market, not the go-to-market deck.

Seven tools, two funnels, a lifecycle system and a seller SOP, all shipped.

I handle two-sided markets.

Separate funnels, separate arguments, sequenced deliberately.

I plan market entry properly.

Beachhead cities, a local argument, unit economics and an assisted motion.

I design for how buyers actually behave.

WhatsApp. An assisted first order.

I install the boring layer.

Weekly funnel reporting, lead-source attribution, seller standards, a tested transaction.

Frameworks installed

The Messaging MatrixTrust Metrics

What I'm not claiming

This was a five-month engagement and it ended in July 2026. The Saudi plan carries a full funnel model, budget allocation and unit economics, but those are targets from a plan, not results, so I have left them off this page. The buyer and seller dual-path entry and the segment definitions from this work are live on foodvessel.com today.