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Under The Spotlight with Ramona Hazan, Founder of RAMONA’S
- Jul 15
- 4 min read
22 years ago, Ramona Hazan was a computer engineer making Houmous at night in her kitchen, soaking chickpeas by day and delivering finished tubs into Soho restaurants at 4am in a little red Peugeot. Today, RAMONA’S is a standout fixture on UK supermarket shelves.
We were delighted to have Ramona join us for the latest in our Under The Spotlight series - a raw, funny and refreshingly honest conversation that gave our founders a genuine masterclass in what it actually takes to build and scale a consumer brand. Here are the takeaways we think matter most.
Sell before you scale
Ramona's advice for anyone starting again is simple. Get your product in front of real people and see if it sells, before you fall in love with it. Family and friends telling you they love something isn't validation - a stranger paying for it twice is. Her method for deciding which new products to launch still hasn't changed. Put it in front of a group of people and watch what gets devoured versus what's left untouched.
Don't mistake enthusiasm from people who love you for market demand. Test in the real world, early and often, and let the data - even informal, dinner party data - tell you what to build.
Resist marketing spend until distribution can catch it
Perhaps the most counterintuitive insight of the session is that Ramona didn't spend a penny on marketing for the first 17 years. Not because she didn't believe in it, but because she recognised that marketing only works when people can actually act on it. If your product is sitting in 100 stores nationwide, driving demand for it feels close to wasted spend.
Marketing amplifies distribution, it doesn't create it. Before investing in brand awareness, make sure the infrastructure exists for that awareness to convert into a purchase.
Quality is the only sustainable growth lever
Ramona was pretty blunt about this: Retailers open their doors because of consistent product quality, not clever campaigns. Awards, she says, look good on the pot but never once opened a door for her. What kept customers coming back, and eventually gave her category-defining loyalty numbers, was relentless, almost obsessive attention to product consistency. Her rule for the factory is if a product isn't up to standard, it doesn't go out, no matter the commercial pressure.
In a category where people can easily switch to a cheaper own-label alternative, quality is a non-negotiable. Loyalty is earned one consistent product experience at a time.
The bravest growth decision is often subtraction
One of the harder won lessons Ramona shared was learning to narrow her range and let go of customers. In the early days, RAMONA’S made almost anything anyone asked for - chutneys and relishes - just to survive. As the business grew, cutting product lines and firing slow paying or low volume customers (some of whom had backed her from day one) felt disloyal and uncomfortable. But it was this narrowing, not expansion, that let the business scale.
Sometimes the biggest way to unlock growth is having the courage to say no to revenue that's quietly costing you focus, capacity, or cash flow.
Self-funding bought her time to build a real foundation
Ramona chose to bootstrap for years rather than raise external investment, deliberately trading speed for control. Her reasoning was that rapid, capital-fuelled growth can outpace the strength of your underlying foundations, and you often don't find out until it's too late. Growing slowly meant she knew her raw materials, her costs, and her product inside out before anyone else touched them.
There's no universally "right" pace of growth. If you self-fund, use the extra time it buys you to build operational muscle you'll rely on later.
Hire for judgement as well as the job spec
Ramona told the story of bringing in an expensive interim production manager she initially couldn't justify the cost of, and how that one hire transformed the business. Her advice to founders here was less about the role and more about the person. Sometimes the right move isn't hiring a role, it's convincing the right individual to stay, even if it means restructuring what you offer them.
The best hires don't always fit the job description you wrote. Be prepared to bend the role to keep exceptional people, especially at the stage where one great operator can be the difference between staying afloat and scaling.
Differentiation on the shelf is a deliberate, brave choice
When RAMONA’S launched, every Houmous brand on the shelf used the same muted, ‘natural’ beige and brown packaging. Ramona went bright yellow, pink and green, against the advice of retailers, who warned her it wouldn't sell. It worked because it forced shoppers to stop and look, giving the product a chance to be discovered in a category where every other option looked identical.
Fitting in with category convention can be the riskier choice. Standing out, even when everyone around you says it won't work, is sometimes what earns you the moment of attention you need to be found.
Leading, not managing, is the hardest transition
As the business grew, Ramona described the shift from being hands on in every function to becoming the person who holds everyone accountable to a single standard - quality - even when every individual department is technically doing its job well. Procurement buying cheaper ingredients, technical teams focused only on compliance, production optimising for speed. All defensible in isolation, but only a founder stepping back can see when they're pulling in different directions.
As you scale, your job shifts from doing the work to making sure everyone else's good work is pointed at the same outcome. That's a genuinely different skill, and it's uncomfortable to learn.
A huge thank you to Ramona for such a candid and generous session. 22 years of hard won lessons condensed into one morning is a genuine gift to our community. If there's one thread running through everything she shared, it's this…
Sustainable scale isn't about doing more, faster. It's about protecting the thing that made people love you in the first place, even when every incentive in the room is telling you to compromise on it.
A full recording of our conversation with Ramona will be available to watch soon on our YouTube channel.
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