Subtitles section Play video
-
Hey guys, welcome to CNBC. Today, we're taking you inside the world's leading cloud kitchen KITOPI.
-
With options for food delivery booming, this Dubai-based startup is taking advantage of all of that demand, is now looking to raise more cash and seriously scale up.
-
Moe Ballout founded KITOPI in January 2018 with one mission, to satisfy the world's appetite.
-
So how do you do that? Turns out, it's not just about food.
-
It's about data, speed and accuracy.
-
When we first started, I never thought that the number one problem in food is actually missing items, that you as a customer would have something missing in your order.
-
So, it's really looking at, how do you solve the issues of quality, issues of speed, issues of availability for the delivery world.
-
Which is very different to solving it, when it comes down to a brick-and-mortar dining business.
-
How many brands do you have at one time in this space?
-
So, we have 60 brands in this site, and we can have anything from 40 to 70 brands in any given sites.
-
Anything from like healthy food brands, salad brands to burger brands, any cuisine type you can have.
-
So, this is a space of about 2,000 square feet. That's not that big, really.
-
It's all about optimizing the space to really allow us to manage the quality and speed of preparing things.
-
How many meals in one day are we talking about?
-
So, a typical kitchen of ours does around 3,000 orders a day.
-
How do you make sure that people aren't missing items?
-
So, the way it works is when the chef prepares the item, they barcode everything that comes out, and everything goes along the conveyor.
-
As soon that goes out, they scan and make sure that everything's actually in that order that's meant to be in it.
-
At what point do you think we could potentially be fully automated?
-
Key parts of getting into full autonomous cooking is for us to really consolidate the supply chain, and really change cooking techniques.
-
And for at least 40% of our products, we've been able to achieve that.
-
The goal is within 12 months to have a fully autonomous kitchen.
-
What's the biggest challenge in your view in terms of that scaling?
-
So, the complexity of being able to cook multiple different items in one kitchen with speed is a very complex problem to solve.
-
So, the way we like to look at a successful order is eight minutes preparing the food, one minute packing it and driver waiting time under two minutes.
-
That's incredible.
-
So that's kind of the goal. Keep the whole entire experience 11 to 12 minutes, allowing the customers to get food under 30 minutes.
-
We've gotten really close to cracking that at scale.
-
The reality is the next big problem is to make sure drivers are not waiting for the food, and drivers are able to pick up food really fast.
-
That's where we develop a lot more software and helping aggregators really optimize their fleets and take much more orders per hour.
-
So, it's not just about being the cloud kitchen. It's about being the smart kitchen.
-
Exactly!
-
We would replicate exactly what you would do as a brand in any city we operate in.
-
You are the consumer, you go online, you place a $100 order and that order comes to our kitchen, we produce the foods, our staff are cooking the food using our smart kitchen operating software in our kitchens.
-
And then we will give you a brand royalty fee for the right to use your brand.
-
Food will be ready, aggregator comes, picks it up and delivers it to the customer.
-
The experience of exactly replicates that of the brand.
-
2020 changing the world. A global pandemic, how has it impacted KITOPI?
-
This really accelerated adoption of online ordering, and it also it really got a lot of the big brands to start accepting that change is coming.
-
For them to really operate in a much more sustainable way, they actually have to operate differently.
-
While it was the global pandemic that put food aggregators like Zomato and Deliveroo on the map, their popularity with consumers hasn't necessarily translated into market success.
-
Deliveroo launched an initial public offering in March 2021 with a $10.5 billion initial valuation.
-
They crashed out on the day by as much as 30%, giving London its worst IPO in history.
-
Where are you looking for growth?
-
We initially started off in Dubai, expanded across the Middle East. So that's a core market for us.
-
In Q4 this year we should be expanding to Southeast Asia.
-
So there's five cities over there that we are focused on expanding through this year.
-
And there's a lot of other clusters of cities outside those two regions that we will expand to a later stage.
-
When could we see KITOPI go for an IPO?
-
I do think the way we see capital raising, whether privately or publicly is a means to just completely satisfy our mission.
-
And we're looking at it as just fuel for further growth.
-
And it's not a particular end state and end goal for us.