Commerce Rewired

Oman has always had a strong home-based food culture. Families cooking recipes passed down for generations, home chefs building loyal followings on WhatsApp and Instagram. But for most of them, there was never a real path to scale.

Hisham Hasan built that path.

In this episode, Mohamed and Joe sit down with Hisham, Co-Founder and CEO of IO Kitchens, the first and leading cloud kitchen platform in Oman. In under five years he has gone from a single kitchen concept to eight kitchens and outlets, 60-plus brands under management.

But IO Kitchens is not just a cloud kitchen. It is becoming the infrastructure layer for Oman’s entire F&B founder ecosystem, from the home cook looking for their first commercial kitchen to the brand ready to open a physical outlet.

We get into what it actually takes to bring a home brand into the mainstream, why most founders are not prepared for what happens next, the economics of the model, and whether what Hisham has built in Oman can travel across the Gulf.

If you are building a food brand in this region, or thinking about it, this one is for you.

Most CPG brands in the Middle East have been talking about first-party data for a decade. Very few have actually built it.

In this episode of Commerce Rewired, Mohamed and Joe sit down with Oliver Klander, RVP Brands MENA at LiveRamp, to unpack who actually holds the data in this region

The retail groups, Majid Al Futtaim, Alshaya, Landmark, are sitting on decades of loyalty and transaction data across hundreds of brands. That position is quietly becoming a media business in its own right. Meanwhile, most CPG companies are still debating where to start.

Oliver has spent two decades working across digital, commerce, and retail media with brands including Tesco, Carrefour, and Samsung. He breaks down what first-party data is actually worth in MENA, why the data underneath has to be structured before speed matters, and what a brand with a modest budget should do right now.

In this episode of Commerce Rewired, Mohamed Al Lawati and Joe Sindaha sit down with Mahmoud Adham, founder of Munchbox and now founder of 10X Scaleups, to trace the full arc of what building a consumer brand in this region actually looks like from the inside.

Mahmoud spent 15 years inside Procter and Gamble and Mars, managing hundreds of millions in capital projects across four continents, before walking away in 2014 to start a healthy snack brand with no regional playbook to follow. Over the next decade he took Munchbox from a one-man online operation to a regional leader with over 2,000 retail doors across seven countries, before its acquisition by Savola Group, one of the largest food companies in the GCC.

What we cover:

• What 15 years inside P&G and Mars actually teaches you about building a business
• The early years of Munchbox, bootstrapping, finding distributors, and getting onto shelves
• How to expand from one GCC market to seven without breaking the business

• What he looks for now when helping founders scale and get acquisition-ready

Beverley D'Cruz did not follow the obvious path.

She studied finance at MIT, stumbled into marketing, took on the jobs nobody else wanted, and ended up becoming the first female General Manager for Pizza Hut Middle East and Pakistan at Yum Brands.

In this episode of Commerce Rewired, we trace the transformation work: taking Pizza Hut Canada from 9% online to nearly 50%, pivoting Pizza Hut UK to digital-first, and then building digital commerce capability across META in a region that plays by entirely different rules.

Now Retail Franchise Director at Costa Coffee Middle East, Beverley joins Mohamed and Joe to talk about what real transformation looks like and what the MENA consumer will demand from brands in the years ahead.

In this episode of Commerce Rewired, Mohamed and Joe sit down with Yannis Dramis, CMO at Nestle Vietnam, to unpack what happens when global frameworks meet the operational reality of APAC markets. Yannis takes us through a career that skipped the usual FMCG playbook, from Greece to Bulgaria to Vevey to Ho Chi Minh City, and what that non-linear path taught him that a conventional one never could. We dig into his work building Nestle's eBusiness Academy and what it actually takes to shift behaviour across a global organization, not just deploy new tools. Then we go deep on Vietnam: Tet and what it reveals about true localization, the mobile-first, platform-diverse nature of APAC commerce, and what it's like to go from outsider to insider in a market as specific and culturally rich as this one.

Legacy FMCG brands were built on scale, distribution, and efficiency.

But the rules are changing, and many organizations are struggling to keep up.

In this episode of Commerce Rewired, we sit down with Alberto Levy, former Global CMO of Grupo Bimbo and Partner at The Partnering Group, to unpack what it really takes to stay relevant in today’s market.

Alberto brings a rare perspective, combining hands-on experience leading one of the world’s largest FMCG companies with a strategic view across multiple organizations transforming.

We go deep on:

• Why many FMCG “transformations” fail before they even begin

• The shift from distribution power to consumer relevance

• What companies measure today that creates a false sense of progress

• The realities of driving change inside large, complex organizations

• How emerging markets are shaping the future of FMCG

This is not a conversation about trends, it’s about how FMCG actually works, and what needs to change.

If you’re building, scaling, or transforming a consumer brand, this episode is packed with practical insights you can apply immediately.

Emerging markets are often seen as high-growth but they come with a very different set of realities.

In this episode of Commerce Rewired, we sit down with Nader Amiri, General Partner at Homegown Ventures, to unpack what it actually takes to build and win in these markets from an investor’s perspective.

We discuss:

• What makes a startup fundable in emerging markets

• The patterns investors see across companies that scale vs. stall

• Why some models travel, and others don’t

• The role of distribution, unit economics, and execution in complex environments

This is a conversation about how investors really think and what founders need to get right from day one.

Most CMOs are buying AI tools.

Very few are changing how their teams actually work.

In this episode, Karim Chaanine CMO of Papa Johns Pizza shares why he took a different approach, building his own agents instead of relying on off-the-shelf tools.

We unpack:

• Why most AI tools don’t translate into real marketing impact

• What changes when you build around your own data and workflows

• How to move from experimentation to execution

• What it actually takes to make AI work inside a marketing team

Welcome to Commerce Rewired.

As growth slows in mature markets, a new playbook for commerce is being written in emerging markets, faster, messier, and often more effective.

In this episode, we share why we started this podcast and what you can expect. From fragmented channels to non-linear consumer journeys, we’ll explore how brands actually scale when conditions aren’t perfect.

Commerce Rewired is about operators sharing what works.

If you’re a marketer, founder, or operator building in today’s reality, this is for you.