Many departments had to completely rethink their trade cycles when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Many trading organisations reintroduced their business modules to the market, reshaping the overall trading model with fresh, inventive, and creative concepts. People affiliated with the restaurant and eating joint industry also began to think outside the box when their trade cycle took a major hit owing to the frequent lockdowns and drop in footfalls. They come up with the idea of “Cloud Kitchen” as a result of their desire to restart their company cycle.
Cloud kitchens, sometimes called virtual restaurants, ghost kitchens, dark kitchens, or satellite kitchens, are restaurants that only offer delivery and do not have any seating available for customers to eat in. Orders can be placed over the phone or online with Cloud Kitchens. For the most part, they take online orders through websites or smartphone applications, or through online food aggregators like Swiggy, Zomato, or Ubereats. Mohamed Al Fayed, CEO and Co-founder of Grub Tech, a (SaaS) startup based in Dubai that caters to “delivery-centric restaurants” and cloud kitchens, provided Kitchen Herald with additional information about their cloud kitchen business in an exclusive interview.
- How do you envisage the future of the Cloud Kitchen concept in terms of business, popularity and easy accessibility?
According to a recent analysis by Euromonitor, the cloud kitchen industry is projected to have significant growth worldwide and reach a value of $1 trillion by 2030. Many restaurants will be operating virtual brands within their locations, which will serve as an extra source of money for their proprietors. They will also observe the inclusion of dark kitchens. The trend towards eating away from home is a driving force behind the expansion of online food delivery services and virtual businesses.
- What is the current market size of this domain and how much do you expect it to grow in future?
The market for cloud kitchens is expected to reach $72 billion by the year 2025 and keeps expanding at a rate of double digits year after year.
- What are the major challenges that one needs to face while setting up cloud kitchen?
Bringing a lucrative degree of efficiency to multi-brand, single-location businesses is a hard task that demands technology. Businesses such as GrubTech have developed an end-to-end platform specifically for this purpose. Operators must make the most of the existing capabilities, such as central menu management and smart kitchen management systems, to maintain uniformity and throughput throughout the operations.
- What are the major issues faced by companies offering cloud kitchen services to brands?
In terms of their approach to the job and general philosophy, every kitchen operator is different. In order to cater to the various cloud kitchen business models, technology and service providers require a system that is both extremely scalable and versatile.
- How does your technical assistance help people to set up their cloud kitchen?
Thanks to GrubTech, a kitchen’s technological setup is no longer an area of uncertainty. We have taken care of automating the entire order journey so that operators can focus on coming up with amazing ideas and making customers happy. Our system can be remotely deployed on a worldwide scale in a matter of days.
- What innovative solutions do you offer to build this domain?
Every step of an order’s lifecycle is covered in our modules. Our clients can manage their menus across all of the food aggregators, such as Zomato and others, thanks to our central menu management solution. As soon as a request is made, we can direct it to the correct place and station. Our Smart Kitchen Display system provides the chef with all the necessary tools to begin the order and prepare the cuisine. Our dispatching technology takes control once an order is complete and quickly assigns the right driver to it. With our real-time dashboards and reports, we guarantee openness throughout the whole life cycle.
- Communication is the backbone of this domain how do your services help owners to run it smoothly?
If our customers have any questions, our team is accessible to help them through various channels such as Whatsapp, email, and Slack. We take great pleasure in being accessible at all hours of the day and night to guarantee that our customers will never have any problems.
- Where does India stand globally in thee current cloud kitchen market?
Rebel Foods was established in the backyard of India and is a trailblazer in this field. It has demonstrated the model’s success and is continuing to grow both domestically and abroad. The Indian market is massive and ready for the food and beverage industry to become digital, so we expect a plethora of new entrants.
