The food industry is one of the largest, rich and financed industries in Africa and the Middle East. According to statistics over 30% of total income of citizens from all over the Africa and Middle East is being spent on food supplies and rations. But, unfortunately there are a lot of restaurants that are struggling to successfully operate their businesses and as a result having problems with increasing margins, ROIs or even operate in a loss.
That’s why Wesam Massoud, Kareem El Daly and Ahmed Osman who are the founding fathers of the startup called “The Food Lab” came up with an innovative idea of the platform that will take care of a vast amount of infrastructure, food operations of the restaurants and as a reward take a small fee from the overall restaurant’s income. All of the founders have a big amount of experience in the restaurant businesses and all of them experienced difficulties in setting up the different operational processes of the restaurants properly to establish a growing margin. That’s why they created a centralized platform that provides infrastructure and food related services to the restaurants, so that management was able to focus more on the strategies and marketing, rather than on questions related to the kitchen and infrastructure.
The idea of the “The Food Lab” was established and created in 2019 by three passionate entrepreneurs who wanted to address the modern issues faced in the restaurant and food industries in Egypt and Middle East. First major success The Food Lab faced recently when the idea had blown up and startup received approximately 4.5$ millions in a pre-seed phase of a venture financing campaign. Founders claim that this amount will be enough to completely take over the Egyptian market and also to enter other Middle East and African markets. For now, startup has two kitchens located in Egypt with the total of 175.000 processed and delivered orders from different customers.
So, what are the services that “The Food Lab” provides and what’s the overall idea of the Cloud for the restaurants? The main idea is to provide a kitchen and cooks as a service for the restaurant and at the same time fully take care of the procurement of the food supplies, delivery to the customer and support of the kitchen equipment. Due to the recent rapid increase in the demand of the delivery services, that can be a perfect solution for restaurants that are struggling with managing all of their processes correctly.
Also, “The Food Lab” has a Machine Learning and Data driven solution that tracks all the data related to the customer orders and makes analysis of their activity and provides dashboards to the restaurant management, so that they were able to build more accurate marketing strategies or for example restructure and reengineer the menu.
For now, startup is planning to “Expand their Borders” and hire more employees for handling operations and also to build new “Kitchen Centers” all around the Egypt and further in other regions of Africa and Middle East.
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This can act as a great way to get a competitive advantage for the restraurants, as well as reduce food waste, which could also contribute for a greener world.