Influential Iranian Women: Tabassom Latifi (1985-)

She was not yet 30 years old when, in 2014, she launched a start-up named MamanPaz, “Mommy-Cooked” or simply “Homemade”  in English, an online platform that allows housewives to sell their homemade dishes from anywhere in Tehran.

Tabassom Latifi was born in 1985 in Khorramabad, capital of western Lorestan province. In 2004, she passed the entrance exam to study electrical engineering at Sharif University of Technology and moved to Tehran. Education has a special place in the Latifi family. She is an engineer and, of her two younger sisters, one is a medical doctor and the other is a dentist.

Latifi’s mother was a teacher and, despite working full time, she always cooked meals for her children. Perhaps one of the reasons why Latifi came up with the idea of MamanPaz was to give students or others who, for whatever reason, cannot have home-cooked meals, especially when she, herself, started working, and witnessed that many of her colleagues were deprived of this joy.

After receiving her master’s degree in electrical engineering, Latifi continued her education at Sharif University to receive an MBA degree. After graduation she worked on a research project, and this was when Latifi found out that she wanted to do more things than just research.

Sometime later, she started working at Pasargad Bank’s think tank and it was at this time that the idea of MamanPaz took shape in her mind. She did not, however, concretize his idea immediately because she was afraid of losing her job.

Finally, after two years, she decided to act: “After several months of trying, I found an investor who agreed to help me and gave me an office on his premises next to his employees who became my first clients,” she says.

The project did not look very promising at first: “When I started, no one around me believed that it would work. I was asked why people would use a site to order food without seeing it with their own eyes; how they might want to eat a food when they don't know how it is prepared... But in the end, in just eight months, we had a success that went beyond my business plan…In the first few months, I only had 250 orders a day, but today it's thousands. I hired about 20 people to work on the project development — that doesn't include the women who cook.”

MamanPaz was started in 2014 but it took two years for the project to become a real success. The numbers of “mommies” working with the website increased and the customers could select what meal and which cook they wanted, even if the cook was not in their vicinity.

On the website, you can order a dish from one of the certified cooks and choose the time and place of delivery. The menu is selected according to its popularity, the type of cuisine offered and its price. Photographs of the kitchens in which the dishes are made are available. Sometimes there are even photos of the cook that concocts the menus. And MamanPaz also lets the customer order for the next day.

Now, working with her husband, Latifi runs a business that works with more than 1,500 housewives and delivers two to three thousand homemade meals a day. And she spent almost no money on advertisements. Of course, she says, reports on her start-up in domestic and foreign media were very helpful.

“We select the cooks in strict terms,” she says. “They have to cook dishes twice to be tested by our inspectors, who also check the hygiene of their kitchen. They then have to obtain a certificate from the Ministry of Health, and we finally give them training so that they can learn how to pack the food for delivery.”

For Tabassom, however, the significance of MamanPaz goes far beyond a successful business start-up. About half of Iranian women, 18.8 million, are housewives and have no way to earn a living by themselves. “I really wanted to give housewives a financial opportunity,” she says “As an Iranian, I know that most women would want to be independent, but without their own income, it is impossible. And many of these women have no other ‘skills’ than good cooking. The figures are clear: 30 percent of women enrolled in MamanPaz are single mothers and others are often poor, and MamanPaz allows the less affluent to improve their standard of living a little bit.

“In Iran, the rate of economic participation by women is 16.3 percent whereas the [average] global rate is 47.6 percent. The current business environment in Iran does not allow the advancement of women inside the businesses’ organizational structure. In other words, women do not see a future for themselves in management or in leadership.”

Leyla, a woman of 31, is one of the “mommies” who works with MamanPaz. “I worked in a beauty shop until I gave birth to my first child,” she says. “It became difficult to keep my job after that. I had to stay at home, but I kept looking for a way to work and earn money. For a year now, I've been working with MamanPaz. At first, I didn't have a lot of orders, but now I regularly make 20 plates a day.

“I work while I'm at home near my child. I get up at 6 a.m. to buy the necessary ingredients for my dishes, then I cook until 10 a.m., I hand over the dishes to the delivery man at about 10:30, and I have the rest of the day to myself. Initially, my husband was very skeptical and didn't think I could make money with MamanPaz. Today, he is convinced that this income is a real plus for our household.”