Restaurant Consultants Cloud Kitchen
Usually, we go to restaurants or order food from outside when we do not have time and energy to cook at home or when we simply crave outside food or when eating outside becomes a habitual norm in a week or a month. No matter which part of the world we go to, we cannot change this aspect of our working relationship with outside food. The three basic prerequisites here are affordability (spending power), availability (services), and accessibility (reaching and delivery).
Along with the three prerequisites mentioned above, the growing popularity of eating outside driven by a growing size of younger population, increasing acceptance of home-delivered, takeaways and OTG foodservices, and increasing urbanization earmarks many countries in Africa as ideal markets for foodservice business. A few such countries in Sub-Saharan Africa include South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Botswana, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Zambia. All the types of foodservice businesses – full-service restaurants, QSRs, cafes, cloud kitchens, and foodservice aggregators are mushrooming here.
The need for businessmen or entrepreneurs is to do their business planning and execution right. That may sometimes also necessitate availing professional F&B consulting services for Africa.
Challenges ahead for Restaurants/Cloud Kitchen/QSR business in Africa:
Logistical Bottlenecks
Running an efficient foodservice business requires a steady supply of inventory. The logistical shortcomings in many regions of Africa often bring up difficulties in ensuring a smooth and reliable supply of inventory. With inventory-related uncertainties, it becomes difficult for restaurants and other foodservice providers to maintain consistency in their services.
Competing with International Food Chains
The potential of Africa’s foodservice market is not a hidden phenomenon. Many international fast-food chains have already established their footing in Africa. It is difficult for MSME foodservice retailers to compete with these brands on any given parameter. This hinders their business sense to go big and cater only to a limited market size which turns into an endless loop of staying a small business.
Problem of Attrition
Attrition in the foodservice sector is a problem everywhere and not just in Africa. New businesses try to rope in experienced cooks and chefs by offering better benefits. And once the chefs or cooks are gone, it adversely affects the flow of routine business. International fast-food brands remain immune to this problem to a great extent because of their unique offerings and shorter food preparation approach in the stores that are not much reliant on people but on processes.
Traditional Restaurants Competing with Cloud Kitchens
The emergence of food delivery services played a big role in the sprouting of cloud kitchens - also known as dark kitchens or ghost kitchens. It proved a strong point that customers are also willing to get their food home-delivered. The next logical question was - why not then serve this large market segment by going dark and save on acquiring or renting expensive real estate space? This is a cause of concern for traditional restaurants because their market share stands diminished now. Also, cloud kitchens can handle more orders and savings made by them on space could be utilized for better food and better services.
Cloud kitchen as a Service Business
Cloud kitchen could mean a restaurant choosing to work on delivery-only model or a service in itself to host multiple restaurants for delivery-only model. As a service business, the requirements for a cloud kitchen are many. Now, this has to be approached like any other business. There has to be market research, business model and business plan development, layout planning, SOP development, assessment of service-related technological requirements, etc. Being a relatively new form of business, the rules of the game remain alien to many.
Avoiding Wastage of Food
Home or a restaurant, wastage of food is intolerable. In the case of food outlets, the responsibility lies on them to ensure that no food goes to waste. To achieve this, they will have to be better at demand forecasting, purchase planning, inventory management, serving sizes, and cooking preparations. They must also encourage customers to order judiciously.
How YRC (Your Retail Coach) can help: a glimpse
We are a boutique retail consulting firm with domain expertise in retail and eCommerce across multiple verticals. In the foodservice sector, we help our clients set up their restaurants and cloud kitchens with expert planning and implementation assistance delivered by our team of cloud kitchen and restaurant business consultants for Africa.
Our market research is intended to provide a comprehensive market overview with actionable insights and recommendations for informed decision-making. We provide a segmented perspective of the market for better targeting and brand positioning. Other key areas of assistance for better planning and strategy formulation are competition analysis, demand projection, price analysis, assessment of the sales channels, SWOT analysis, and trend analysis.
In business model development, our experts will help you identify and define the Unique Value Proposition and the framework of the value chain and internal capabilities of your foodservice enterprise. Thus, what you get here is also a planned roadmap for creating and delivering the identified UVP.
Our F&B consultants will help you map the financial assessments of your foodservice business project. The ultimate goal is to enable you to foresee the commercial viability of your project (including ROI and breakeven analysis and the projected profit and loss statements).
YRC helps in formulating business plans for the varied nature of foodservice enterprises:
- Fine-dine restaurant business plan
- Cloud Kitchen business plan
- QSR or fast-food business plan
- Coffee shop business plan
- Bakery business plan
- Hotel business plan
- Cafe business plan
For both restaurants (outlets with dine-in facility) and cloud kitchens, a good layout planning is critical to make the most of what we have given the constraints of space, meeting design specifications, and need for operational efficiency. To help you efficient layout planning, we address zone classification, visual strategy, time and motion study, security provisions, and much more.
From the opening and closing of the shutters to receiving orders and fulfilling them, whether it is a restaurant or a cloud kitchen, SOP manuals are the backbone of the operations of a foodservice enterprise. Whether it is reordering of raw materials or packaging containers, payment of salaries to staff, maintaining safety and hygiene in the kitchen, or handing over the right package to the delivery partners, SOP manuals define every step with every necessary specification to successfully complete an operation.
Managing the HR department with modern-day professionalism is a universal requirement and that does not change for the foodservice sector. YRC will help you with organization design, staff analysis, succession planning, PMS, change management, and HR manual.
We are a boutique retail consulting firm. For more information on our foodservice business consulting services for Africa or if you have any query, drop us a message and we shall get back to you.