DHDL deal falls through: Why Tillman Schulz is not investing in Korean food startup Arang

Food entrepreneur Tillman Schulz promised founder Sung-Hee Kim 100,000 euros – but the deal didn't go through, as Gründerszene has learned.

Everyone agrees on the founder: She's good. Approachable and authentic. Her story is also compelling: Sung-Hee Kim is the daughter of Korean immigrants. Her parents opened the first Korean restaurant in Northern Germany in the late 1970s.

She's truly committed to her culinary roots. As a tribute to her mom and dad, she named her startup the same name as her restaurant: Arang.

Then, however, the question is what the typical Korean marinades and soups that Sun-Hee Kim sells should cost.

More than six euros for a sauce? That's difficult, the Lions think. Even if the natural ingredients are great. But they actually complicate the problem: The purchase price of the wakame seaweed soup, for example, is 4.60 euros, the founder explains when asked by the Lions. And the RRP in the store? 6.95 euros.

"That's a very small margin ," says Carsten Maschmeyer. He doubts the entrepreneur will make a profit with that and therefore rules out a deal for himself.

Sug-Hee explains that she is convinced that she can make more margin through volume, but Dagmar Wöhrl and Nils Glagau do not see it that way either and say goodbye – respectfully and not without emphasizing that the products are a hit in terms of taste.

Tijen Onaran is the only one who doesn't entirely agree—one of the sauces is too spicy for her. Nevertheless, she once again praises the entrepreneur as a person and emphasizes how much she supports female founders with a migration background—in her heart. In this case, though, not with money.

And then there's Tillman Schulz , the food investor. As the founder explains in the clip before her pitch, she recently saw him eating Korean food on Instagram. Is that enough?

Schulz weighs things up: Kim wants €100,000 for a 20 percent stake in Arang. That makes a company valuation of half a million euros. For a business that, according to the founder, has generated €42,000 in sales in the last 15 months.

"I'd be up for it, but I wouldn't do it for 20 percent," says Schulz. "You need so much support in purchasing and operations..." He could offer that, but he'd want 35 percent for it. The entrepreneur wants to think about that for a moment.

After a brief pause, she negotiates it to 30 percent. Tillmann Schulz stands up, briefly hugs the founder, and says, "Deal."

So much for the show.

However, nothing came of this "deal" afterward, as Gründerszene learned from the founder: "After the recording, we realized that our ideas regarding the company's strategic direction do not fully align. Therefore, we have mutually decided not to pursue the originally agreed deal," according to the mutually agreed statement.

Schulz is one of the most reserved investors on DHDL. His deal rate isn't particularly high. In the last season, the sixteenth, for example, Schulz only agreed to two deals on the show: with the food startup Ratzfatz and the beauty startup Maleup . Both of these deals fell through after the show, as Gründerszene learned.

The food business is actually in his genes: Tillmann Schulz, the son of an entrepreneur, was born on September 10, 1989, and lives in Dortmund. His grandfather, Helmut Schulz, founded an import company for fish from Scandinavia under the name MDS in 1949.

Tillman Schulz and his cousin Moritz now run the company in the third generation. It comprises 19 subsidiaries and supplies retailers such as Aldi and Lidl with general groceries. The product range also includes medical, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and beauty products. The MDS Group estimates its annual sales in the hundreds of millions.