Nowadays, Cloud kitchen platforms like kitopi are growing tremendously. Many customers are preferring food delivery service instead of going to a restaurant, since covid-19. As it needs less investment and more profit, many entrepreneurs are entering the business. Cloud kitchen is the new food processing and delivery technology to keep up with the population increase and renovate its food processing industry. Let’s discuss what is cloud kitchen, what is kitopi and its features, types of cloud kitchen models, and its cost in this blog.
What is Cloud Kitchen?
A cloud kitchen is a type of virtual kitchen space that allows a menu for delivery and takeout but has no dine-in. As Cloud kitchens are low-cost to start, enhanced with a fast delivery experience, low overhead, high customer demand, and easy to access with user data, they are on-demand.
In Cloud kitchen, the meals are prepared based on the orders made by customers through its digital platform. The main advantage of cloud kitchen is that there is no need for additional facilities like dining services, offers parking space, and other things as seen mostly in the traditional restaurants. As its cost is low, owners provide the meals at the lowest price with high quality to the customer and in return, they obtain a perfect raise in their business by taking restaurants online.
What is kitopi and how does it work?
Kitopi is the world’s leading cloud kitchen company functioning in UAE, KSA, Poland, Bahrain, and Kuwait with more than 3000 employees. Established in 2018, they connect with restaurants that need to deliver their meals online. It allows other restaurants to open delivery-only locations with the provision of essential kitchen infrastructure and its official app. The overall evaluated market valuation of kitopi is over 1.2 billion US dollars. Many other cloud kitchen platforms like kitopi make a more profit from this business since the kitchen business is more popular nowadays.
Kitopi aims to satisfy the world’s hunger with impressive food of the user’s choice. Kitopi enables restaurants to function in various locations requiring less time and less investment with infrastructure and software in less than 14 days. They also enable a smooth experience for the customer while offering to receive orders, processing ingredients & cooking, delivery, and customer review management.
Here’s how does the kitopi platform works.
- To join this platform, brands or restaurants have to pay an onboarding fee. As revenue, kitopi takes part of it and also gives them a 10% royalty fee in return for all sales.
- Brands provide their menu and train kitopi’s employees on how to cook with recipes, after joining. They use qualified employees to prepare food on behalf of the brands.
- Finally, kitopi does the end-to-end function for the customer. Kitopi has a kitchen center in each city where they operate and most of the food preparation is done here. The final touches are given in a smaller kitchen closer to the delivery area and deliver the food.
How to start a kitopi like cloud kitchen:
Here are 3 parts to start the cloud kitchen. These are choosing a model, operational need, and technical need.
Choosing a cloud kitchen model:
You can choose any model that is suitable for your business needs by understanding the details of all the below models.
- Standalone kitchen: This is the most familiar cloud kitchen model where a single concept is followed, and there are only one or two food options are provided. For example, a pizza joint, where the menu is within ten or fifteen items.
- Cloud restaurants: In this model, the brand works inside the kitchen of existing restaurants. The brand uses their infrastructure and prepares food based on the customer’s orders. The restaurant provides its infrastructure to the brand for usage by making contracts or taking rent. So that, the brands can avoid spending money on utensils, furniture, and other kitchen accessories.
- Co-working cloud kitchen: In this model, many online restaurant businesses operate in one place. The separate kitchen is distributed among each online restaurant business. Every brand pays rent for using the infrastructure of the kitchen.
- Aggregator cloud kitchen: It is an extended version of the co-working model in which the kitchen infrastructure is provided to restaurants that need to prepare food for delivery only.
Hope you understand the cloud kitchen models and now you can start your business with the help of the best model.
Operational needs for developing a cloud kitchen like Kitopi.
To open the cloud kitchen, you need to consider the below physical and technical things.
- Location :
The cloud kitchen doesn’t need a large space, but it must be closer to the target customers or delivery areas. When the cloud kitchens are located near the delivery area, they can make the delivery quickly. It can be set up in the residential area, unused parks, and even movable food trucks.
- License:
License is an important part of the cloud kitchen. It helps to get a certificate and license that ensures the quality of your food since customers can’t see the food safety and hygiene by visiting the outlet.
- Kitchen and packaging equipment:
The equipment fully depends on the food you prepare for the customer. If you are having a complicated and wide food menu, the equipment list will be huge. At the start of cloud kitchen, you can only spend money on a fridge, stove, oven, counters, and cooking utensils. Packaging is the next main part to be considered. If your food is good but the packaging is bad, it will collapse the customer experience.
- Kitchen Staff:
You will require the cooking and cleaning staff mostly since the cloud kitchen is generally the backend of the restaurant system. At the beginning of the business, there will be enough of a group who knows how to cook food with quality while ensuring the hygiene of the kitchen.
Technical needs for cloud kitchen business:
After setting up an operational needs for your business, you can set up your business for the digital platform.
- POS system:
Point of sale system is useful for your business to improve and gain more customers. This system gets orders from various social and other platforms and maintains real-time order records. This system will help you in finding what works best for your business by examining your platform’s online sources of enormous visitors and food orders.
- Online Ordering Software:
This is optional for your business. If you are using third-party software for online orders, you will pay them 12%-18% for online orders and 18%-25% for deliveries. So, create a food ordering app that you can outsource to reliable software providers.
- Food Delivery System:
There are two choices to deliver food to your customers. Either you can deliver through third-party delivery services like Uber foods or you can hire delivery drivers for delivery from your restaurants.
For an initial stage of business, it is better to deliver food with the help of third-party delivery drivers. After the growth of your business, you can hire delivery drivers for cheaper and faster delivery.
- Inventory Management:
Inventory management is needed for your business to manage and avoid unnecessary costs for running your kitchen business. Using inventory management software, managing the overall inventory can be done. You can easily and quickly refill all the kitchen items by checking the inventory management software.
Guide to developing online cloud kitchen platforms like Kitopi:
- To keep track of your kitchen business, use a restaurant management system.
- Choose the inventory management system to handle kitchen stocks.
- Decide the UI of the app.
- Create an online portal for getting food orders.
- Choosing and providing great multiple payment options.
- Designing a platform to take customers’ feedback.
- To see the customer’s desirable dishes, build the customer’s order history. And recommend them in the future.
- Allow customers to give advance orders for parties, birthdays, and celebrations.
- Include minimum order value feature.
- The menu will be changed based on time.
- Add SSL certification for enabling encrypted connections.
- Use POS(Point Of Sale) such as Shopify, Lightspeed POS, etc.
- Using CRM(Customer Relationship Management) for improving customer experience.
- Do testing to see detects and drawbacks of your app.
- Promote your kitchen business to gain more customers.
Cost for developing an app:
The Kitopi-like cloud kitchen cost depends fully on the features you want to be included. The range is based on your solution provider. If you invest your money and time in the leading food app development company like Smarther, they can help you to develop multiple types of web and apps at the most affordable cost. And our experts have experience in building cloud kitchen apps.
Conclusion:
Cloud Kitchen Service is the greatest food technology revolution. So, it is better to develop the restaurant model for both business owners and restaurants brand to work together. Smarther is the best e-commerce, web and mobile app development company to develop app with quality and flexibility.
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