Tiny Cloud Kitchens see rapid expansion amid pandemic targeting existing restaurants
Tiny Cloud Kitchens, the operator of virtual restaurant brands offering restaurants a way to make back sales lost during the pandemic has added four more sites as it continues to quickly grow amid changes in shifting consumer habits and uncertainty due to Covid-19. They provide restaurants everything needed to reach the increasing number of delivery customers by providing restaurants with a collection of trendy virtual restaurant brands and a system to operate them as cloud kitchens, simply adding them into the existing restaurant kitchens or the back of house of catering establishments.
Tiny Cloud Kitchens has hired food franchise specialist Seeds Consulting to create a competitive franchise offer and drive the recruitment of qualified franchise partners across the UK.
“Our sites have seen an enormous rise in demand for delivery both through increased customer loyalty and from acquiring new customers as people have shifted how they are eating and who they turn to for their next meal.” – comments founder Philip McGuinness – “With their existing personnel and with no upfront investment, we provide restaurants with successful brands that we have tested since 2017 in our London kitchens. We have designed the system so that all the virtual brands can be operated from their existing kitchens with the same staff and using, for the most part, the same ingredients. Our tech infrastructure allows us to manage all brands and delivery platforms from one dashboard and to optimise the sourcing of delivery drivers thanks to our own driver app. All this combined makes our operation lean labour-wise and we have an industry-leading gross margin. A huge concern to restaurants looking to get into or expand their delivery services are delivery platform commissions, which we mitigate by having our own e-commerce, which currently accounts for approximately one third of sales”
McGuinness adds: “All we have created and refined in our operation since we started is now available to existing restaurant operators that want to do it as a cloud kitchen or from an existing restaurant, hotel, pub or other hospitality venue. This model offers them an easier way to create more sales and profits, and because there is almost no investment, it is a risk-free proposition”.
Matteo Frigeri of Seeds Consulting, which has been retained by Tiny Cloud Kitchens to manage franchise recruitment, explains: “Compared to a traditional food franchise, Tiny Cloud Kitchens involves a fraction of that investment, and because it has excellent intrinsic economics and relies on secondary locations while achieving high street sales, it can pay back the investment in a matter of months as opposed to years. We see huge potential for this type of innovative food franchise and in fact we have already signed up our first operators, that are due to go live in the next few weeks”.