The owners behind the revolutionary UAE-based Cloud Restaurants company are hoping to disrupt the market even further with the launch of a digital franchising concept that will fuel their Middle East expansion plans.
Rowan and Ziad Kamel, who have been in the restaurant business for more than 15 years and currently operate their successful French bistro, Couqley, in the Movenpick Hotel, JLT, launched Cloud Restaurants in 2017.
Ziad told Arabian Business the opportunity arose after initially teaming up with aggregator Deliveroo to offer a delivery service and then being invited to be part of a new kitchen facility, which the company was opening in Downtown Dubai.
He said: “At that time there were no phrases like ghost kitchen, cloud kitchen, dark kitchen.
“But I guess that was the eureka moment where first of all we said yes, because who doesn’t like business expansion, and secondly, as we were thinking about the kitchen team we would be building for that purpose and everything that goes into operating a delivery brand, we thought of, why don’t we launch multiple brands from the same kitchen infrastructure.”
Rowan and Ziad Kamel
And so, after extensive market research, Go! Greek was launched in 2018, soon to be followed by Go! Healthy, Go! Pasta and Go! Chinese. After recording around 800 orders in its first month, the company now boasts 12 delivery-only brands, is operating in more than 15 cloud kitchens across the UAE and is pushing around 27,000 orders-a-month with consistent growth.
Ziad said: “We were profitable from the first month. We fully returned our investment in around four months and we continued to remain profitable and grow. We took pretty much all of that excess cash flow, pumped it back into the company to launch the other brands.
“We just continued pumping in the money and growing ourselves, until this day when we are debt-free and we have 100 percent of the equity and we’re managing to grow in this manner through strategic partnerships.”
Rowan revealed that strategic agreements have been signed with cloud kitchen partners in Kuwait, Riyadh and Jeddah, although expansion plans are being hampered by various border closures imposed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
She said: “We’re ready. We’ve done all of the homework with all of the suppliers. We have our branding team, we have our brand account handlers. We have a team in Saudi, we have a team in Kuwait that are ready to launch. We have the kitchen ready, it’s just a question of connection and injecting that soul to ensure that the branch is launched in the best way possible.”
That’s where the new concept comes in as Ziad explains how he wanted to “reinvent the way expansion and franchising is done”, by launching a virtual brand digitally.
We want to be able to use the digital tools we have to transfer the knowledge of our brands to a kitchen team, let’s say, in Kuwait, without any of us having to travel there. And to try to recreate the same brands, using the same recipes, using the same product lists, with the same quality and consistency and roll it out within the same kitchen network within that country without us ever having to physically step foot there,” he said.
“That’s our new R&D and if we crack the digital franchising, which we think we’re going to do, then growth becomes extremely lucrative because we can replicate this digital franchising system to many different franchisees across many different countries and markets where there’s the delivery app infrastructure and the cloud kitchen infrastructure,” he added.
According to a report from Redseer Consulting, which was released in December last year, the UAE was set to see a doubling of growth in dark kitchens to $100 million in 2020 from 2019, riding on the back of a Covid-19-induced surge for online ordering of food.
Significantly, the huge jump in the dark kitchen-serviced online food business comes amidst a projected 40 percent fall in the overall food services sector in the country in 2020 to $9 billion from $15 billion last year.
Ziad said: “It’s all about innovation and being one step ahead. What we did three years ago was extremely innovative at that time but is not innovative any more. Everyone is running cloud brands out of their existing kitchens. No-one is doing cloud or digital franchising, we’re just forced to do it because we want to grow. We’re actually trail-blazing and trying to create that whole infrastructure and that whole ecosystem.”
Follow us on
