Akash Shah is an entrepreneur and an engineer who is an ardent participant in the Indian start-up ecosystem. With expertise in product development, technology architecture, growth hacking and business development, Akash finds his passion in building efficient teams and scaling frugal start-ups. As the Co-founder & CTO of YumzyX he aims to develop a solution driven work culture and keenly promotes the same values among all his clientele.
Much before the surge in COVID-19 cases, physical elements like a storefront, paper pamphlets, etc. offered a leeway for restaurants or food business owners to showcase their brand image. The tables turned upside down when the restaurant owners had to shut their outlets altogether and rely on the food delivery apps. Now that the customers can’t be seen on the restaurant floor, people need a way to connect with the restaurant’s brand. The only solution when a restaurant is at its wit’s end is to consider setting up an online ordering platform or a cloud kitchen concept to streamline the ordering process.
How Digitization Rescued Brands Operating in Isolation
The rise of Cloud Kitchens painted a positive picture for the food and beverage sector. This was but followed by the challenge to create an impactful presence to build customer relationships. Restaurants have got physical elements like pamphlets, standees, outlet themes, etc, to showcase their brand value, on the contrary, cloud kitchens have only got a website that acts as a restaurant storefront.
Therefore, cloud kitchen owners begin to utilize unconventional ways to showcase their brand value in a finesse manner. Representing the website as a canvas to paint a vivid brand story of the business, creating engaging digital campaigns, and manufacturing methodologies that speak your brand tone have helped potential customers to connect with the brand’s persona.
Painting a cloud kitchen’s picture can be as simple as publishing a stellar copy or content that reflects the cloud kitchen’s ideology. Nevertheless, solely putting out stellar content and an appealing website is not enough to boost a cloud kitchen’s sales.
Online Ordering Platform Making Cloud Kitchens Touch Horizons
Most cloud kitchen owners omit the importance of affiliating their website with an online ordering platform. They get stuck within the comfort zone offered by third-party food apps. Being in the food-tech industry, it was imperative for the restaurant & cloud kitchen owners to not rely on a single plan, rather lay their eggs in multiple baskets to keep business on the safer side. Food Aggregators further assisted the business get orders but kept the cloud kitchen owner limited to exploring and experimenting with different business models.
With the digitization of the world, the competition increased, and there was a strong need for cloud kitchens to build their own online ordering platform alongside affiliating with third-party food delivery apps in order to stay ahead of their competitors. To make a strong foundation for a cloud kitchen, the business needed to run operations in a functional & dynamic manner. A cloud kitchen can’t simply rely on food delivery apps, but yes these apps posed as a stepping stone for running the cloud kitchen operations.
For the business to flourish successfully, cloud kitchen owners needed to utilize food delivery apps and own online ordering platforms to balance out the profits. With the current pandemic, it was a task to decide on which one is better or which model one should opt for, for running cloud kitchen operations. But, it was essential to balance out both models and use this combo to the max, to perfectly run the business in this vertical.
Amalgamating technology to ace the realm
Someone has rightly said that big risks always pay off, but many of the popular food chain delivery apps have broken the paradigm of taking greater risks. With the emergence of ultra-modern AI-driven technology, more and more people were coming up with creative yet affordable ways to set up a business. Taking inspiration from existing popular Cloud Kitchens, many owners explored more tech-friendly ways to give a kick to their quick-service food chain business. Additionally, it helped them get rid of the primary problem of retail, i.e. finding the perfect store location, and offered them freedom from the shackles of offline constraints in making sales.
Though there is no hard & fast rule of taking a business online, individuals always try different permutations & combinations for aligning the business operations and generating the maximum revenue out of the business model. However, in the current scenario, by setting up a dynamic online ordering platform the rising brands could save a lot of time and money, which is a necessity for running a traditional restaurant business.
Now that a huge chunk of restaurateurs are transmogrifying their business by turning their brick & mortar business plan into an unconventional cloud kitchen concept, they need to understand the unlimited power of building one’s own online ordering platform as an add on to third party delivery apps. By doing all this one can set a benchmark in the F&B industry.
Another pre-eminent fact is that a cloud kitchen that has its own online ordering platform can offer an edge over the location, customer demographic, scaling constraints, and even food fatigues, everything can be evaporated at once.
To wrap up, the rise of the concept has made it evident that cloud kitchen in itself is a trump card and as we witness the emergence of more participants, an integration with an Individual online ordering platform alongside efficiently taking orders on third-party apps, cloud kitchen businesses can become limitless plus stay guarded against any potential risks in the industry.