SmartLunch in Czechia - cold outreach on a market labelled as “closed”
46+ qualified leads in 6 months on a market the industry called closed for cold email.
Who they are.
SmartLunch is a Polish employee-meal platform operating since 2014. The company offers end-to-end outsourcing of workplace catering - from daily meal delivery for offices, factories and warehouses, through running employee canteens, to regenerative meals compliant with Polish workplace safety rules. Orders flow through an intuitive mobile app or dedicated SL OrderPoint devices.
More than 211,000 people in Poland actively use the SmartLunch platform. From 2025 SmartLunch is also available in Czechia. The Czech market was one of the first international expansion targets - and one of the more demanding ones.
What was in the way.
SmartLunch's Czech market entry started with an external outbound partner. The engagement underperformed - quantitatively and qualitatively. Operational mistakes triggered visible dissatisfaction from prospects, voiced directly in their replies. After analysing the situation and its potential impact on brand perception on the new market, SmartLunch decided to end that engagement.
Independent of the previous experience, the Czech market itself was a real challenge. The industry consensus is that cold email doesn't work on this market - Czech companies are seen as hard recipients for that type of communication, and most agencies SmartLunch asked simply declined to run Czech campaigns. SmartLunch heard that answer many times before deciding to change partners.
Employee catering in Czechia works differently than in Poland. A variety of meal solutions is the default for many companies, not a choice. In practice, the initial messaging that positioned SmartLunch as a meal vendor was met with rejection. The angle had to change.
How we approached this market.
Market analysis and communication adaptation
We started by mapping Czech business communication culture in detail. The reasons were concrete - earlier attempts had ignored this dimension, and the Czech cold-email market itself, partly due to legal restrictions and partly due to negative recipient sentiment, was widely considered closed. Even local agencies declined to run campaigns there.
Our approach rests on a simple belief - regardless of where in the world a campaign runs and what regulations apply there, on the other side of every message is a person. If we can understand their situation, their attitude toward unknown senders, and the overall business culture they operate in - we can reach them. That's what we did on the Czech market.
Analysis of the Czech business context surfaced a few important differences relative to the communication style we use in Poland:
- The weight of academic and professional titles - addressing a recipient as 'Pan Inženýr', 'Pan Doktor' or 'Pan Magistr' is, in Czech business correspondence, a sign of respect, not formality
- Higher correspondence standards - 'Dear Mr. [Surname]' instead of first-name addressing signals professionalism and a higher contact register
- Calm, matter-of-fact tone - Czech business recipients react badly to pressure and artificial urgency; the message has to stay measured and concrete.
Every message also carried an opt-out clause in the postscript - a note that a one-line reply was enough to immediately stop the contact. Anyone who used that option landed automatically on a suppression list. An operational mechanism, but also an explicit signal that respect for the recipient is the default, not an exception.
Messaging evolution - from product pitch to operational argument
Phase one of the campaign delivered an encouraging signal - a reply rate higher than expected, with a significant share of replies, despite not being interested, kept in a polite and friendly tone. For a market widely thought of as unresponsive to cold email, this was a result that validated the chosen communication approach.
The dominant objection in the replies pointed however to a content barrier - companies were saying they had other meal solutions and didn't see a reason to change. SmartLunch was being read as just another meal vendor, not as an alternative to the existing setup. The whole sales narrative had to be reframed.
Instead of pitching the offer directly, we rebuilt the entire sales narrative around the recipient's operational reality and a different set of pain points than the ones campaigns usually lead with. The change of perspective produced a noticeable lift in campaign performance.
Test everything, scale what works
We don't start from an assumption about who the right decision-maker is. Instead of guessing, we test many personas and messaging angles in parallel - including non-obvious ones that most campaigns never even try.
Every version is measured against real campaign data - engagement, reply quality, the path to an actual conversation. From there we cut what doesn't work and concentrate resources where the results are strongest. This approach - test broadly, scale the winners - was one of the key drivers of the conversion lift.
Outcomes, in numbers.
Across just over 6 months of campaigning - conversations with decision-makers and first pilot deployments.
Global FMCG, cosmetics, international retail, logistics, manufacturing groups. Many publicly listed European companies.
Across just over six months the campaign delivered 46+ qualified leads, which converted into conversations with decision-makers and first pilot deployments. Among the companies we engaged were segment leaders - global FMCG and cosmetics brands, international retail chains, top logistics operators, manufacturing groups, and recognised players in B2B services and finance. Many of them are publicly listed on European exchanges or international groups present on dozens of markets.
Equally important - and personally meaningful for us - was the shift in the client's stance. SmartLunch started the engagement with willingness to act, but also scepticism about cold email as a channel in Czechia, especially after the previous experience on that market.
We addressed that through complete transparency - the client had uninterrupted visibility into every message we sent and every reply we received, plus how we managed every contact in real time, so the situations of the past would not repeat. Even refusals, of which there were many, stayed civil and free of negative charge.
The win we're proudest of - the client moved from skepticism about cold email in Czechia to conviction - and a decision to keep going.
The Czech campaign is a case study in rebuilding trust in an outbound channel and turning it into a stable lead source - on a market that had been classified as hard or unreachable for cold outreach.
What we took away.
Three things made the decisive difference in the outcomes of this campaign.
Deep adaptation of the communication to the local business culture
Not a translation of patterns from other markets, but a from-scratch approach tailored to the Czech market - addressing style, register, and the subtle signals of respect for the recipient.
Iterative evolution of the messaging
A willingness to change the entire sales framework in response to real market feedback - moving from a 'meal vendor pitch' to an operational argument grounded in the recipient's reality.
Respect for the recipient as an operating principle
The opt-out mechanism and the elegance of the communication translated directly into performance and the absence of negative reactions - even from companies that weren't interested.
The Czech market confirmed that cold email - run with the right preparation and discipline - can be an effective expansion tool even under demanding conditions.
“I started this engagement after a failed first attempt and with the assumption that cold email in Czechia simply doesn't work. The way Scaling Labs handled the communication, tailored to the local culture, and the safety they built around the whole process meant that, after our earlier experience, I could finally trust this channel. I also appreciate their proactivity - new ideas for strategy, targeting and content that genuinely translated into conversations and meetings with companies that impressed me.”
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