FOOD STUDIO
Q: What is the rationale behind the Food Studio?
A: The purpose of Food Studio is to expand Sri Lanka’s food culture. Our goal is to redefine Sri Lanka’s gastronomic experience by breaking free of what we know as a typical food court.
With the establishment of mixed use development projects such as the Colombo City Centre and One Galle Face Mall, the fast-growing urban development market in Colombo has helped us perfectly position our food courts as an easily accessible option for food, complete with an abundance of choices of cuisine under one roof.
Today, each of our outlets plays host to a wealth of local startup brands that serve customers alongside highly coveted restaurant brand names. Our objective is to bring together the right mix of flavours that range from the adventurous to the nostalgic, and from street food to fine dining. We want to create different types of cuisine for consumers while also trying to change the tastes and eating patterns of the multitude of visitors to the malls.
In short, our motive is to be disruptive and innovative in the food and beverage arena.
Q: How would you describe Food Studio’s growth despite the obstacles it has faced since its launch?
A: We launched our brand with the idea of challenging contemporary food courts and their outdated concepts. So we focussed on developing a space where we can bring like-minded restaurateurs and individuals together to showcase dynamic and novel cuisines.
Then we had to identify entities and bring them together to form a good combination of tenants while ensuring that each of them doesn’t cannibalise the others’ performance within the food court space. Managing over 15 tenants in each location is no easy task.
What’s more, since our inception in 2018, the Easter Sunday attacks, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, political instability and the current hostile economic conditions have affected us adversely year after year. This situation has pushed us to revisit our business strategy and change our game.
When we established Food Studio in 2018, we owned only five restaurant brands under the Food Studio umbrella. But today, we have taken over 80 percent of stalls at each of the food courts, and
One of our greatest growth indicators is the creation of our own food brands, which will further enable us to expand even beyond food courts
own and operate over 15 brands as our own. We built our team and strategies to have complete control of our tenant mix by identifying cuisines that will work in the market, and we are currently reaping the benefits of this move.
However, there still are challenges especially when it comes to inflation and food costs. We are constantly conceptualising how to mitigate these problems and in that sense, we hope to contribute to a much bigger picture by putting a long-term farm-totable plan in place. Sorting out our problems between ourselves gives us the opportunity to think about how we can ease the overall issue with sustainable solutions.
Since retaining talented human capital in this country is not easy, we try to provide our culinary enthusiasts with the right training and confidence in running their own stalls, giving them a sense of ownership in their respective outlets and encouraging them to grow the business together with us.
Q: What are your organisation’s plans for the future?
A: One of our greatest growth indicators is the creation of our own food brands, which will further enable us to expand even beyond food courts. We have already identified many locations both within and outside Colombo where we plan to open individual restaurants for each of these stand-alone brands.
Within the last year alone, we have added four new brands to our portfolio of outlets – namely Champion Slice (NY Style XL Pizzas), Hotel Manoli (Levantine Soul Food), Bamboo Boy (Noodles & Dumplings) and Khayaban (authentic Pakistani cuisine). All of them are one of a kind food concepts that aren’t seen anywhere else in Sri Lanka.
We will be opening our newest food court at the Havelock City Mall later this year, and a brand new project is set to hit the streets of Colombo very soon.
Moreover, our ethos is to build a farm-totable community of local and international F&B stakeholders to connect and collaborate with each other, and introduce a unique, diverse and affordable dining experience in Sri Lanka.
To this end, we want to be able to complete the whole farmto-table cycle by focussing on where we source our ingredients, working with farmers themselves or even investing in and entering the trade of growing our own produce. We also plan to get involved in supply chain management and identify methods that allow independent delivery of the essentials our chefs require to curate their authentic cuisines.
When it comes to our talent pool, we are looking to establish a culinary institute to empower the people we hire so that they can grow with us. The institute will teach our chefs and kitchen staff not only the art of cooking authentic food but also enable them to open their own outlets someday in the future.