New Delhi (India), December 27: Technology plays a significant role in the restaurant industry, helping businesses streamline operations, improve efficiency, and accelerate growth. The whole ecosystem relies on technologies from online ordering and mobile payments to customer relationship management and marketing.
In addition to these most used technologies, the industry has been adapting to some breakthrough technologies like automation of cooking processes, dashboards for POS integrations, and automated processes to minimize waste at kitchens, and these techs can help food brands optimize their operations
Take the case of Delhiicasy.com, a Delhi-based cloud kitchen that serves Chinese cuisine. Their kitchen doesn’t have a traditional Wok, and all the Food is cooked with automated equipment. The Owner, Suraj Bhatia, shares that he is very specific about his operations and SOPs and wants to ensure that Food from any of his outlets tastes the same. So, he chose to automate cooking in his kitchens and Wokie by Mukunda Foods in his kitchen dishes out of close to 2K Chinese items in a month.
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If you reside in cities like Indore, Raipur, Delhi, or Gandhi Nagar and ordered Food from “The country Wok,” then your Food was cooked by an automated machine from Mukunda Foods. Ankit Jain, Founder, of The Country Wok, says that my head chef has designed the best recipes, but he can’t be cooking across 20 outlets, and I needed a fix since my expansion plans are ambitious. So opting for technology for me was an obvious choice. I have already automated around seven outlets, reducing my dependency on skilled labour.
According to Eshwar K Vikas, CEO & Co-Founder of Mukunda Foods, some of our clients moved their kitchen operations totally to automated, and they receive close to 50-55 in an hour during peak hours. On average, the kitchen preparation time as per aggregators is under 15 minutes, and in an automated kitchen, it is less than 5-6 minutes. So the whole idea is to build an efficient kitchen with the help of these technologies.
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Another important aspect of food systems is supply chains which are highly distributed and unpredictable. It gets essential for small food businesses to scale up their operations to cover high fixed costs & get to profitability. UdyogYantra, a Delhi-based start-up, helps food businesses digitize food supply chains, making them transparent, predictable, safer, and more efficient. Ankur Jain, Founder & CEO of, UdyogYantra, adds that right from Food Procurement & Inwarding to Food Production & Food Distribution, UY’s Enterprise Tech enables Food Businesses to save costs, increase revenue, and achieve scale via standardization.
Another technology that has reached almost all cloud kitchens is POS software. For instance, a cloud kitchen can receive orders from various ordering apps like Swiggy, Zomato, Magicpin, UberEatsetc and now centrally managing these orders, their billing, inventory, and business reports is a humongous task, and the POS software automates these aspects of a kitchen. While talking to Saurabh Gupta, Co-Founder of Urban Piper, he shares that "Small food businesses were the most impacted segment due to Covid. They started adopting technology to digitize their businesses in the hope of connecting with their customers in newer ways and finding a way to adopt the new normal. This mind-shift on the SME segment of merchants helped them become more adaptable and enabled their business to get more organized. They started seeing the benefits of maintaining a digital stock of their inventory to generate POs and connecting to their suppliers in a much more efficient manner. "
Overall, technology has greatly impacted the way that kitchens operate, helping to improve efficiency, reduce the need for skilled labour, and ensure consistency in the quality of dishes. By embracing technology, chefs and restaurant owners can focus on their passion for cooking and delivering great food to their customers.
