Restaurants/Cloud Kitchen Consulting
Being a tourist attraction and business hub, one can never run out of good food options in Dubai. From lavish and luxurious restaurants to budget-friendly street food options, Dubai houses it all. And if you want a list of some of the hot-selling dishes in Dubai, it has to include Manousheh, Shawarma, Shirin Polo, Al Harees, Mehalabiya, Ghuzi, Falafel, and we could be stretching this list forever. You will also find many renowned food chain brands from all over the world with customizations to suit the local culture and customers’ expectations.
Varied and sophisticated tastes and preferences of customers, high disposable income levels, the growing popularity of the urban lifestyle, and the cosmopolitan nature of the city has significantly contributed to the growth and development of Dubai’s foodservice market.
Despite the lucrative market opportunities, starting and managing a food service business in the form of a restaurant or cloud kitchen in Dubai comes with many challenges. Some of these challenges may be universal. What is required is a planned and professional approach to going about it. We have listed some of these challenges below followed by highlighting how Your Retail Coach can help you smoothly establish a robust foodservice business in Dubai.
Challenges for retailers in the foodservice sector
Expensive real estate
Even owning or renting a small space in Dubai can be a big affair because of its pricey real estate market. The increasing number of retail brick and mortar businesses fuels the demand for commercial space every day. It becomes a big financial burden affecting a business’s ability to hit the breakeven point. It is an unavoidable challenge but with the right considerations, competitive business modelling, elaborate financial planning, and efficiency in operations, this challenge can be moderated to the extent of turning it into an advantage.
Lack of UVP
From globally renowned brands to established local restaurants and cloud kitchens, competing in Dubai’s foodservice market calls for a stronger value offering. In the food business, getting customers to know about your food and place is the biggest marketing challenge. For once, customers have to come and taste the food and feel the place. If you have done everything right, the chances of revisits get exponentially high just after that first opportunity to serve. This is where a strong UVP comes to work. It could be in the view and ambience of the place, quality of the food, variety of cuisines/dishes, CRM, waiting time, etc. Moreover, Dubai is a place where customers carry high standards of expectations from retail food service.
Attrition
Because of plenty of incoming and existing restaurants and cloud kitchens, the job market for experienced chefs and kitchen and service employees in Dubai remains as green as green could get. Thus, attrition comes up as a challenge for food service businesses. In such a situation, prospective employees get an upper hand in salary and benefits negotiations. This becomes a source of destabilization for businesses, both in terms of HR and finance and extending to operations and profitability.
Identifying the target market
With international tourists and local customers, restaurants and cloud kitchens in Dubai face the challenge of identifying the right market segment. Most players choose to play by their strengths alone instead of adjusting to the market realities and doing the right marketing and financial assessments also. In our role as F&B consultants for the UAE’s foodservice sector, we strongly believe in following a planned and systematic approach for a comprehensive market study.
Avoiding wastage of food and input ingredients
Food is precious and we must optimize its usage. Whether it is at home or a restaurant, wastage of food is intolerable. This cannot be put forward any more straightforwardly. And in this pursuit, it is a responsibility for foodservice businesses to ensure that they are good at demand forecasting, purchase planning, inventory management, and serving sizes. They must also encourage customers to order judiciously. Businesses also need to bear in mind that Dubai and other UAE emirates are heavily dependent on food imports. Thus, it is not only a business prerogative to save food but also a moral, social, and economic responsibility.
How YRC can help you through Cloud Kitchen Consulting Services: a glimpse
As a domain expert in retail and eCommerce, YRC helps businessmen and entrepreneurs set up their restaurant and cloud kitchen business with expert planning and implementation assistance. We strive not only to ensure that a business is ready to go but also that it remains sustainable, growth-oriented, and scalable. Here is a glimpse of our restaurant consulting services as F&B or restaurant consultants or cloud kitchen consultants for Dubai’s foodservice sector.
Our market research aims to provide a comprehensive market overview with actionable insights and recommendations for informed decision-making. You will have a segmented perspective of the market for better identifying the target segment and brand positioning. Our competition analysis will help you in assuming an affirmative stance in the chosen market segment. Other key areas of assistance to help you further fine-tune your marketing decisions are demand projection, price analysis, assessment of the sales channels, SWOT analysis, and trend analysis.
Whether it is a restaurant, virtual kitchen, ghost kitchen, dark kitchen, online ordering platform service development, or delivery kitchen service, we will help you identify and define the UVP and the framework of the value chain and internal capabilities of your foodservice enterprise. Thus, with our restaurant consulting services, what you get is not only the element of brand distinguishability but also a roadmap to how that unique value is going to be made possible and delivered to your customers.
YRC will help you map the financial assessments for your foodservice business so that you can foresee the commercial viability of your business project and forecast the ROI and break-even. This will let you have the much-needed financial vision and numerical preparedness to make important business and financial decisions. YRC helps in formulating business plans for the varied nature of foodservice enterprises:
- Fine-dine restaurant business plan
- QSR or fast-food business plan
- Coffee shop business plan
- Bakery business plan
- Hotel business plan
- Cafe business plan
With physical space being a constraint, good layout planning becomes critical to make the most out of what we have. Simply speaking, the layout must be attractive and comfortable from the customer perspective and efficient and optimized from an operational point of view. There must be an opaque barrier between what customers need to see and what they need not. In QSR/cloud kitchen consulting, our cloud kitchen consultants will cover zone classification, visual strategy, time and motion study, security provisions, and much more.
Behind how quickly an order is served or is made ready for dispatch lies the quotient of operational efficiency. From the opening and closing of the shutters to receiving orders and fulfilling them, foodservice businesses rely on their operational manuals or the process SOPs. In QSR/cloud kitchen consulting or restaurant consulting, our team of SOP experts and cloud kitchen consultants will map these process SOPs for your restaurant or cloud kitchen. The flow of tasks and responsibilities will be mapped in every possible detail so that there remain no operational loopholes. Now, for instance, planned and defined purchase planning and inventory management activities also help foodservice businesses to minimize the wastage of food and input ingredients.
Managing human resources in the foodservice sector could be a slightly different ball game. The head chef somehow is the most important person. If you lose him or her to a competitor, there may not be an easy replacement any sooner. Mentioning this is not to undermine the importance of the rest of your workforce. Apart from effective HR strategies like these, you will also need a strong organisational structure and a roadmap for effective management of human resources in your enterprise. In restaurant consulting or QSR/cloud kitchen consulting, we will also 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 restaurant and QSR/cloud kitchen consulting services or if you have any service-related query for our team of cloud kitchen consultants, drop us a message and we shall get back to you.