Backend technology in the F&B industry is crucial but often ignored, Hospitality News, ET HospitalityWorld
The panel titled ‘Pushing the technology envelope: What is the horizon and future for the role that technology plays in hospitality and F&B?’ saw a lively discussion with Kushang Kumar, co-founder & CEO, Supplynote and Sumit Gulati, founder, Paschion Restaurants moderated by P Krishna Kumar, deputy editor, ET HospitalityWorld, at the first ET HospitalityWorld F&B Summit which took place recently in Delhi NCR.
“The Indian F&B industry, the fourth largest in the world, has around USD 60 billion by revenue, but if you look at the backend, which is almost USD 25 billion, and growing at a very healthy CAGR, it's completely offline. It's completely disconnected. There is hardly any adoption—in numbers, there are more than seven million restaurants in the country, but only 400,000 of them are listed on Zomato, Swiggy, Dot pay, Thrive and all the new age omni channels, which are giving revenues to the restaurants. Of course, people develop revenue first, but if you will look on the flip side, we have not been able to create a lot of Michelin stars, we have not been able to create a lot of brands which are global. One of the reasons why we are just catching up with the advanced economies when it comes to food is because we have not focused on the cost side, the standardisation, and the operations part of the restaurants. That's where I think data really helps. And that's why we need digitisation of the backend,” rued Kumar.
Gulati, who operates successful brick and mortar as well as cloud kitchen businesses spoke on differentiating his technology needs.
“A brick and mortar or any other kind of F&B operations, require technology to run the back end, manage your food cost, do billing and all kinds of things. Cloud kitchens add an extra layer of menu integration with the aggregators. So, on that front cloud kitchens are deeply integrated with all kinds of technology. The demands (of the businesses) are 80 percent similar, but cloud kitchens have an extra layer of order integration. Like when you order on the app, the order lands directly in front of my chef. So in every cloud kitchen we have a screen in the kitchen that shows every ticket with how much time it has taken,” Gulati said.
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