- Sanjay Jayawardena on cloud kitchens transforming the food industry
But what does this mean for the future of food? Can the new normal see a new type of restaurant coming to be? One that is more digital? Brunch sat down with Sanjay Jayawardena, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and mastermind behind a cloud kitchen platform that, over the last year, has brought three carefully considered digital restaurant brands to the market. Jayawardena’s cloud kitchen portfolio includes the digital restaurants Spicy Mango, Curry Kitchen, and the newly introduced Shaolin Wok.
Spicy Mango, Curry Kitchen, and Shaolin Wok were born out of Jayawardena’s passion to get involved in the Sri Lankan start-up ecosystem. An accountant by profession, much of Jayawardena’s work in the corporate world focused on clients who were expanding their businesses into new locations. Using data to form financial strategies for this kind of expansion was where his expertise lay.
After 10 years working in the UK, his passion for the start-up ecosystem led Jayawardena back to Sri Lanka, where he held the position of Chief Financial Officer at the tech start-up oDoc. His introduction to the food industry came through an eight-month accelerator programme based in India that oDoc was selected for. Through the programme, Jayawardena was able to get firsthand experience in the online food market that was taking off rapidly in India and growing exponentially, long before the influence of the pandemic.
The concept of the cloud kitchen
At its most simple, a cloud kitchen is a kitchen or restaurant that exists online and doesn’t have a physical dine-in space. Customers interact with the restaurant and its brand digitally, ordering food and having it delivered, whether by the cloud kitchen directly or through a food aggregator.
Jayawardena’s cloud kitchen brands Spicy Mango, Curry Kitchen, and Shaolin Wok operate on this premise. “We work through all online channels and the majority of our business takes place through aggregators like PickMe Food, UberEats, and Eat Me Global and through direct deliveries via our web, social media pages, and people who call us directly,” Jayawardena shared, adding that the bulk of his brands’ activity and customer acquisition takes place online.
Jayawardena’s brands include Spicy Mango, which focuses on making the local food that we Sri Lankans love to eat, from our own cuisine to the international dishes we can’t do without like biriyani, nasi goreng, and fried rice; Curry Kitchen, which focuses on providing a curated lunchtime menu for office professionals; and Shaolin Wok, a good old-fashioned Sri Lankan Chinese food brand that specialises in fusion Chinese food with the spicy Sri Lankan twist that makes our take on Chinese cuisine unique and so popular that we sometimes forget it is not, in fact, actual Chinese food.
Spicy Mango, Curry Kitchen, and Shaolin Wok work out of a centralised kitchen that has been built to accommodate the infrastructure of multiple food brands, from the bulk of purchasing to the distribution of the finished product. Jayawardena explained that he approaches his cloud kitchen brands in the same way an FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) conglomerate would approach their various individual brands. “We develop individual brands that target different foods in a customer’s journey and we create the food in a centralised kitchen where we can put up multiple brands. Each brand has its individual identity and element of responsibility, with a senior cook responsible for each brand’s quality and authenticity, but the brands share resources through a central kitchen.”
A lot of the inspiration for Spicy Mango, Curry Kitchen, and Shaolin Wok stems from the example of Rebel Foods, an Indian online restaurant company that operates 11 cloud kitchen brands including Faasos, Behrouz Biryani, and Oven Story. It is the largest cloud kitchen restaurant chain in India, operating more than 320 cloud kitchens in India and over 500 in the overseas market. “I wanted to use the knowledge I had gained from India and go about executing a similar model in Sri Lanka,” Jayawardena said, sharing that six angel investors have joined him in helping his vision of a Sri Lankan cloud kitchen platform that can compete in the international space come to life.
A cloud kitchen versus a traditional restaurant
With the cloud kitchen concept still quite new to Sri Lanka, Jayawardena shed some light on the nitty-gritty of running a cloud kitchen and how that compares to the traditional restaurant. The one thing that does not change is the product, and the expectations the customer has from that product, and this is where Jayawardena explained that cloud kitchens meet their biggest challenge – connecting with the customer. With traditional restaurants, customers form a connection with the restaurant’s brand long before they get to see or taste the food the restaurant is offering. This connection begins to form the second they walk in – it’s formed through interactions with staff, the ambience, layout and decor of the restaurant, and then the food itself.
For cloud kitchens, this is a bit more challenging. “It’s a bit more mechanical with cloud kitchens,” Jayawardena explained. “It’s going on the app, ordering, and having food delivered. Customers don’t get to physically interact with the brand, so they don’t know a lot about the restaurant’s values. That lack of understanding with the customer is the difference between eating at a traditional restaurant versus what you see with a cloud kitchen.”
Spicy Mango, Curry Kitchen, and Shaolin Wok overcome this challenge with help from the Airbnb model of brand interaction. “We try to amplify the customer’s journey with the brand and product from the very inception,” Jayawardena said. “In the case of Airbnb, for example, brand interaction starts from going to the website or seeing an ad, and continues to the point where you’ve gone and stayed at the place you’ve selected – an end-to-end journey. We took a similar approach.”
For Spicy Mango, Curry Kitchen, and Shaolin Wok, the customers’ journey begins when they see one of these brands online and decide to make a purchase, and Spicy Mango, Curry Kitchen, and Shaolin Wok have great faith in their partners, having optimised their aggregators and their delivery processes to help them reach customers. The next touchpoint of the customer journey is at the point of delivery when they see the package itself and are able to form an opinion of the brand they have chosen based on how it is presented and packaged, and here Jayawardena pays close attention to communicating his brands’ identities. “We go into the finer details, from how we fold serviettes to how things are placed within the bags, so that as soon as they open the bag, the customer forms the opinion that this brand is the real deal and comparable to a traditional restaurant experience.”
Customer service is also a key element for Spicy Mango, Curry Kitchen, and Shaolin Wok in giving customers an authentic, positive experience. “Wherever possible, we like to interact with our customers and give them the ability to reach out to us if there are any issues. The team is comprehensively trained in customer service. We have partnered with a front-runner in the IT kitchen sector and use state-of-the-art software that is not available here to efficiently receive orders directly from aggregators so that all operators can work seamlessly,” Jayawardena explained, adding that the communication on packaging is also very clear so customers can get in touch with them easily to report an issue.
“There is no one fix to solve the constraints of being a cloud kitchen,” Jayawardena said. “It’s multiple things and a lot of out-of-the-box thinking on the best way to build brand loyalty and understanding what your customers expect.”
Food, the digital age, and the future
The food industry is growing and changing. The online food business was expanding significantly, even before the pandemic, which has only served to accelerate this growth. Even in Sri Lanka, the delivery market is now virtually unrecognisable. Before the advent of UberEats and PickMe Food, the market was relatively small, but these aggregators changed that, giving any restaurant the ability to deliver with minimal infrastructure investment. The pandemic and the whole global shift to online versus offline has only emphasised this.
But what of post-pandemic? Jayawardena shared that, to him, the delivery and online food industry is not going to see a decline. “The online market is here to stay. Once things get back to normal and stabilise, people will gradually look to go back to normal dine-in, but the online market will also continue to grow and become a part of the F&B industry.”
While it is hard to determine the exact proportion of online food in the F&B industry of the future, Jayawardena noted that the last 10 years has seen lots of markets, like commuting, for example, transform after moving into the digital market through revolutionary models like PickMe, and that the food industry should be no different. “With the food market, power is still held by traditional restaurants, but with the rise of aggregators and the pandemic changing human behaviour, I believe that food will be the next frontier in the digital age. It has a lot to do with demography as well – lots of people, especially middle-income professionals and professionals between 25 and 45, are moving away from traditional households and looking at more convenient, affordable, and healthier options to get food sorted.”
Cloud kitchens are a way of doing this, with food from cloud kitchens being more affordable and made by professional chefs, some of whom provide food to the same level as five-star hotels. “If you can order five-star level cuisine to your home that is probably cheaper than what it takes to make it yourself at home, it becomes a no-brainer to move toward alternative methods or, at the very least, increase frequency. It has a lot to do with how our society is changing as a whole. The convenience factor is what people are looking for, and so we believe this segment will become significant.