Bright Golden Side of Cloud Kitchen

The food and beverage (F&B) market has come a long way from being limited to a few days out of eating or special ordering. With the advent of companies like Suigi, the way people keep an eye on food consumption has changed dramatically. That favorite food from your favorite restaurant no longer makes sense to wait for a less busy weekend. One click and you're away.

And as the landscape has evolved, new ideas have found their way to them. One of the most popular of them is the subject that brings equal measure of excitement and pain. Cloud kitchens are basically a storefront non-storey food joint and delivery-cable model. This model helps keep the margins running at a time when customers are becoming more price conscious, reducing many different costs compared to a traditional themed restaurant.

According to a report by Research on Global Markets, the combined annual growth of the অনলাইন 45.56 billion online food delivery market is expected to grow by about 37.08 percent in 2013. Of the total market size, dark kitchens accounted for 30 percent of the market, the report said.

However, with dark kitchens still stunned by the relatively new concept of food space and even growth, concerns have been raised. From the lack of transparency in terms of hygiene to the unequal taste for similar food items, there are various points about the emergence of these unwavering competitors of traditional theatrical restaurants.

The Dark Kitchen Conference at the Indian Restaurant Congress 2019 saw the participation of several names across the Indian F&B industry, where topics have expanded due to different needs and both restaurants and dark kitchens serve increasing use of data in the space.

Experience cannot change

According to chef Harpal Singh Sokhi, the F&B space is going through a learning curve at the moment and brands should focus on the customer experience regardless of their model. Consider the experience, it’s a dark kitchen or a traditional restaurant, Sakhi said.

Sokhi said the idea of eating out at a restaurant involves an experience for the customer, even those who are ordering in anticipation of the experience from their meal.

“Taste can’t change the experience, it’s the bottom line,” he said. 

Working with multiple hotel chains and restaurants throughout his career, Sokhi said some of the best-known brands across the country do not have standard recipes or processes. If a particular chef leaves, there is no mechanism in their place that ensures that their main dishes will taste the same if the replacement makes it.

As new brands come in both places, a standard process helps maintain taste and retain loyal customers.

Even in the case of franchise outlets, it comes to quality control and compliance, said Biju Thomas, managing director of Adiga, a popular food service brand serving South Indian food.

In addition to the company-owned outlets, Odiga has entered the franchise outlet and cloud kitchen over the past few years.

Thomas said as brands grow and it becomes impossible for top leadership to inspect each outlet frequently, it all boils down to a well-adjusted system and whether it can be sustained along with scalability, Thomas said.

‘Create a brand, not just a label’

“It’s an endless game of relentless execution,” said Sagar Kochhar, chief marketing officer of Rebel Foods, proving that it was important to remember one moment of each rule truth.

Rebel food known as Fassos is one of the first Indian brands on the way to the dark kitchen. Initially a chain of small-sized food connections that served the twist, the company has now transformed into multiple brand students, each with its own set of meals.

Sagar Kochhar, the chief marketing officer of the rebels, explained the scene, saying that about 67.67 per cent of our business was through delivery.

When they realized that most of their customers, even those who hadn’t seen their storefront, were in for a ‘rescheduling’, he said. "When we said this, if customers are consuming us in this format, why do we limit ourselves to the fact that we only have to bring a physical store model?"

Kochhar said they realized that the desire to be the biggest on their diet needs more than the biggest footprint. From a customer perspective, to be the largest in space, the company needs to have an answer to all the thirst that a customer may have.

"You need to be present at every event when the customer wants to order food."

And so Fassos and now Rebels embarked on their journey of creating different brands, each serving a different thirst, a different experience that a person wants out of food. According to Kochhar, however, creating a brand is not just about creating new labels.

"Customers are not stupid, if you just try to create a label from your offer they get it. As a brand you have to address a necessary gap that exists in that very departmental space. You should stand up for it. "

Leveraging technology

While technology has enabled the growth of the F&B market, a large portion of restaurants still have not benefited from all the innovations that are happening.

Sahil Jain, co-founder of table reservation agency Dineout, said: “About 70 per cent of restaurants have expressed their intention to use at least technology.

Dineout, after gauge the existing supply gap in the market, realized that there are multiple solutions in the market for different problems but not a one-stop solution for everything. "We realized it's a lot of data, which is probably crippling the restaurant ... and we said data should be enabled, not crippled."

The Delhi-based company developed a product that covers all types of modules, from taking a customer to a restaurant to collecting data with various aggregators.

Commenting further on the use of data within the food tech space, Joseph Cherian, chief operating officer of Swiggy Access and New Supply Initiatives, said it had been becoming easier to figure out what information was needed to open a dark kitchen.

Foodtech Unicorn is an initiative to help Swiggy Access restaurant partners founded kitchens in areas where they're doing not operate but where they're going to have the advantage of.

With multiple data points collected and available, one can identify certain things with greater accuracy than before, Cherian says. "We should be able to determine location, brand and price point"

Cherian said the Swiggy Access, which started two years ago, now contains a few thousand brand kitchens.

"It really does prove that if you've got got a decent business model and if you attract the correct partners and if you've got got an information driven approach you need to accelerate very quickly."

Mobicon is another firm that helps restaurants make better use of technology and data.

"Most of the restaurants I ask to rent are data analysts," said Samir Khadepan of Mobicon. "How restaurants often sit on an unlimited database but don't know the way to use it."

Opportunity ahead

In the last five years, both the concept and implementation of dark kitchens in India became leaps and bounds, but this could be just the beginning of an outsized opportunity at no cost.

"At the highest of the day, i feel the food continues to be local," said Shanti Mohan, founding father of online funding platform Letsventure. Challenges for the industry.

Another challenge for coping with dark kitchens and quick fixes is how people have a glance at health nowadays. “How you offer something that's trusted by your users will actually become the next big question to answer,” he said.

According to Sandeep Murthy, partner at capital firm Lightbox, it absolutely was the “marriage of technology with the understanding of the thanks to give some thought to brands” that made a business like Rebel Foods attractive to them.