THE NEW CENTRAL KITCHEN
One thinks of central kitchens and catering kitchens as places that provide food for airlines, hospitals and schools or sites that deliver pre-prep items to restaurants. There is, however, a new generation of central kitchens that cater to the home/office
These central kitchens are small, yet specialized, with most linked to one flagship shop that serves to market the offer. Foodwise, these central kitchens mainly cater to the generational shift that has resulted in a newfound consumer focus on fresh, organic and nutritious ingredients, with consumers more aware and mindful of what they eat. The dining market has seen the inclusion of more nutritional entrants, offering fresh, organic and free-range options.
This health boom has been seen predominantly in the fast/casual segment, generally in four different formats: • Organic-based concepts, serving premade salads and menu items that are portioned and re-heated upon order,
excluding customization. Examples include 1762, Freshii and Joga. • Health-based/meal-plan online restaurants, offering daily/monthly meal plans solely through home delivery. Examples include Kcal, Fuel Up and Right Bite. • High customization formats, where items are custom-made to order. Examples include Richy’s, Just Salad and Saladicious. • Healthy and organic meal boxes for the user to prepare at home. Examples include Hellochef, Plated, Blue Apron.
The global food delivery market totals 83 billion euros, approximately 1 percent of the total food market, according to data compiled by Mckinsey & Company in 2016. In general, various delivery applications in the market allow consumers to connect to a variety of restaurants through one single application or website. QSR and fast/ casual restaurant chains opt for their own delivery platform.
Home-delivery is now an individual, verified restaurant category, allowing food concepts that want to avoid incurring the costs of opening a fully-operating restaurant to function, using a central kitchen and delivery-only format. Higher-end restaurants, whose business models did not initially include delivery, have also jumped onto this bandwagon, benefiting from an additional revenue stream through apps such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Consumers have the opportunity to dine at home with the quality of food that they would enjoy in a higher-class restaurant. In general, these apps mainly cater to mid-to-upper market restaurants, compared to Foodonclick and Talabat, which are largely QSR providers. Despite the abundance of delivery apps, there is a high level of customer loyalty in the Middle East, Mckinsey & Company found in 2016, with 72 percent of customers never or rarely switching their preferred application of choice. With UAE banks now supporting online purchases, food applications in the region have evolved from search and discovery functions only, to full order and payment transactions, changing the way consumers interact and transact with restaurants. This decreases the level of human contact required in phone ordering and helps to eliminate the possibility of error.
The ease of convenience in the fast-paced environment of today is the key selling point for these delivery apps, with 24/7 accessibility at the click of a button. In its UAE Food and Beverage Report, 2016, KPMG found that three or four respondents ordered take away/delivery at least once a week. Price wise, 38 percent said they would pay under AED 50 per delivery, while 43 percent and 18 percent were prepared to pay AED 61-100 and AED 101-300 respectively.
KPMG’S survey in 2016 states that 37 percent of the operators felt that healthy eating was still a fad and more time was needed for it to be fully established in the UAE dining scene.
However, as 2017 progresses we see healthy eating becoming a strong trend rather than a fad, with healthy food becoming firmly cemented as a part of the Millennial lifestyle, which seeks to balance experiences and health: hence consuming healthy food during the day, and indulging on treats on evenings out and weekends. thomaskleingroup.com