India’s food service market is growing at a CAGR rate of 11.19 per cent, and if you look at chain QSRs, the highest growing segment is at 23 per cent CAGR. The deep penetration of large MNC brands like Macdonald, Domino, and KFC can majorly drive this. But home-grown brands have also taken an aggressive approach to expansion, be it Wow Momo!, Samosa Party, Chaayos, Good Flipping Burger, or Burger Singh.
Some brands already have more than 50 outlets, which means they are already on an expansion spree. All of these brands look towards technology to majority solve for consistency, scale and better operations. Solutions to address these challenges will keep evolving and getting better in 2023.
While talking to Mohammed Bhol, Co-Founder and CEO at House of Biryan, shared that tech has been a Boon for us, especially when we are looking at scaling up. Tech and automation will play significant roles, starting from manufacturing to store operations. For instance, UdyogYantra, a Gurgaon-based company, provides AI-based solutions to ensure all produce/products are in top shape before they’re used for cooking.
Then Auto gravy brat pans ensure no skill is required in mixing while cooking since it comes with time and temperature control settings.
Similarly, IOT devices ensure the temperature is maintained in the warehouse and transported until it reaches us. Then at the outlet level, devices like Smart Scale with camera ensure product SOPS are followed when going to the consumer.
Most importantly, cooking processes like cooking rice and frying have been automated with MukundaFoods’ products. So the idea is to replace human judgements from the operations with the help and technologies.
Adding to what Mohammed said, Suraj Bhatia, Founder of Delhiicacy, a Delhi-based brand, said that in 2023 and the coming year, access to constructive data would play a significant role. For example, POS software will go beyond being a billing solution or inventory management. I use PetPooja for POS, and they recently added a feature that reconciles all the sales happening across all the aggregators and matches it with what they will release.
So it automates the process of manually checking each of the mails from the aggregator, and a brand can avoid discrepancies there. Similarly, my cooking process is automated since my kitchen has only automated fryers and woks from Mukunda Foods.
This takes care of my challenge of hiring and retaining skilled labour while ensuring my food tastes exactly how my chef wants it like. So, suppose I notice many complaints about the under and over-cooking of food items. Since I have access to data, I can immediately check if each cooking cycle follows the
Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). Similarly, the device might often show some errors, but the operator shuts it down and starts it again, and it might work. So, your staff might ignore it, but your tech provider will immediately get in touch with you to correct it before it becomes a showstopper.
With the vision to make cooking more automated and convenient, Eshwar K Vikas, Co-founder & CEO of Mukunda Foods, said that in 2023 we are looking at making the cooking processes even simpler by minimising human intervention so that the consistency isn’t compromised.
To solve this problem, we are giving a more automated touch to even regularly used equipment in the kitchens with the launch of an automatic griller that grills wraps, kebabs, and sandwiches automatically and a smart boiler and steamer that cooks/boils items like pasta, rice, and noodles exactly how the chef wants it.
Adding to this, our machines are IoT connected which gives us access to a lot of data that helps us in the maintenance smoothly by keeping a track of which machine at a particular location requires any kind of service in the next 10 or 15 days.
So Food tech and automation solutions will be seeing significant developments to address concerns like high food wastage, high attrition rates, and dependency on skilled labor.
Some of the players working to address these challenges are Mukunda Foods which automates cooking processes; Pet-Pooja and, UrbanPiper are POS players and UdyogYantra technologies, which provides authentication and digitization in food businesses and supply chains with its AI-enabled solutions. Food service industry will be focused on the standardisation of processes and operations
