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Sapphire Chef Goes Global With New Biz

Chef Azmin Ghahreman is widely considered one of Orange County’s top culinary figures.

The founder and owner of Sapphire Laguna restaurant in Laguna Beach might also be the busiest person in OC’s booming restaurant and food scene.

“My car is my office,” Ghahreman said last week at a meeting at the high-end restaurant along Coast Highway.

A 100-mile day traveling to the serial entrepreneur’s varied business interests—including lines of businesses that deliver healthy and affordable meals to schools and area companies—is the norm, he said.

Ghahreman is about to get even busier, with a growing line of work that he thinks will be his largest venture to date; one with a potential to reach about $40 million in sales over the next few years.

His Laguna Beach-based Dellah LLC, a maker of spices, sauces, seasonings, curries and other products with flavors spanning the spectrum of international cuisine, has quickly grown from a side project to full-blown operation since its establishment in 2017.

The company’s wide line of products—ranging from gumbo and tikka masala seasonings to a Caribbean-influenced mango habanero sauce to a Jamaican mango curry paste to a Japanese-flavored katsu sauce—already can be found in more than 1,000 Ralphs, Krogers, Smart & Final stores and other supermarkets across the country.

The products are marketed under the Dellah brand, named after Ghahreman’s daughter, as well as the Mamu Wu name, a nod to the mother of his partner in the venture, Ling Wu, who is also part of the Pomona-based drink maker Sonora Corp.

A larger expansion of Dellah is planned, with Ghahreman preparing to roll out and expand distribution for new lines of frozen meals such as beef teriyaki, spring rolls, and salmon dishes, salad dressings and other types of foods that he insists will top the competition in taste, as well as nutrition.

“My vision is to bring chef-driven quality food into every home, without any additives or preservatives,” he said.

Expect Dellah’s lineup to continue to grow; Ghahreman said he isn’t short on ideas for new recipes.

“I’m an inventor,” he said.

Sales for Dellah now run in the seven figures. Ghahreman thinks the retail business can grow to become a $30 million to $40 million enterprise in a few years, although it will likely take an investment partner.

He said he and his partner have self-funded the business to date, but are open for the right co-investor to expand.

CEO Ties, Schools

Ghahreman’s had no problems linking up with notable names in the local business community for his other lines of work, most of which operate under the Sapphire Culinary Group umbrella.

His Sapphire at Work arm, launched a few years ago, serves customized menus to corporations: Irvine-based medical device maker Masimo Corp. is a client, as is Irvine’s FivePoint Communities.

Ghahreman said he considers the chief executives of those two firms, Joe Kiani and Emile Haddad, respectively, close friends. The Sapphire at Work venture resulted from a lunch meeting with Kiani, who asked Ghahreman if he would “take care” of the roughly 690 Masimo employees at the company’s Spectrum-area headquarters by providing them with healthy meals.

Many would consider the Masimo site a cafeteria, but Ghahreman has said that he views it as a restaurant with his name and reputation tied to it.

The Masimo cafeteria serves omelets, pizzas, Asian-inspired meals, pastas imported from Italy, and American foods, such as Philadelphia cheesesteak sandwiches.

Other Ghahreman business lines include Sapphire at School, which serves about 5,000 healthy meals a day—about $3 each—to nearly a dozen private and public schools in the region.

There’s no reason that the school model couldn’t be franchised to other markets and school districts, he said.

“We have the recipes.”

The low price point of the school business is a model he’s aiming for with Dellah, at least initially, as the company looks to keep prices low while distribution expands.

Other Sapphire offerings, which got its name from the gemstone in his wife’s engagement ring, include catering and consulting lines of work.

Ghahreman’s businesses employ 130 total.

Sapphire Restaurant remains his home base. About 50 of the employees he works with across his various business lines are at the Coast Highway site, which has been open for a dozen years. A “pantry” store next door offers a good number of the Dellah products now on the market.

Hotel Background

The Iran native was raised in Switzerland, and an engineering major in undergraduate school in Indiana before dropping out to enroll in culinary school in San Francisco.

He took the advice of an instructor who suggested he work for a hotel to learn as much as possible about his chosen profession. He ended up as the executive chef at what was then called the St. Regis Monarch Beach in Dana Point, now known as Monarch Beach Resort, following eight years at several Four Seasons hotels around the world.

The hotel background instilled a business executive’s type of focus to his work, something not all other chefs can figure out, he said last week.

Ghahreman decided when the last recession weakened Sapphire Laguna’s business that he would branch out instead of hunkering down, keeping his eyes open for opportunities in the marketplace.

“The recession taught me to have guts and to be strong when making business decisions,” he previously told the Business Journal.

Ghahreman said he works 70 to 80 hours a week and usually makes unannounced visits to each of his ventures, visits he said typically reveal more than the effectiveness of his staff or the kitchen.

Hence the miles quickly adding up on his car.

The only food-related item not on Ghahreman’s resume? A cookbook.

It’s something he said he’s thought about often.

“But first I need to find the time.”

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Mark Mueller
Mark Mueller
Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of the Orange County Business Journal, one of the premier regional business newspapers in the country. He’s the fifth person to hold the editor’s position in the paper’s long history. He oversees a staff of about 15 people. The OCBJ is considered a must-read for area business executives. The print edition of the paper is the primary source of local news for most of the Business Journal’s subscribers, which includes most of OC’s major corporate and community players. Mark’s been with the paper since 2005, and long served as the real estate reporter for the paper, breaking hundreds of commercial and residential real estate stories. He took on the editor’s position in 2018.
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