Brito, an Egyptian Kitchen as a Service startup announced that it has raised $1.25 million to invest in its kitchen technology, grow its delivery fleet as well as expand its presence in Cairo.
Launched in 2022 by Rania Reda and Mo’nes Sadeq, Brito Cloud Kitchens owns and operates a series of smartly distributed, and fully operated Cloud Kitchens all over Egypt helping international brands to expand their presence and delivery to the Egyptian market in no time and with minimum investment.
Brito helps restaurants and food concepts to take advantage of a huge market and expand in a wisely calculated approach to ensure a speedy go to market, consistency of their food taste and convenience to their new wide audience.
A cloud kitchen, also known as a virtual kitchen or ghost kitchen, is a commercial food production facility that allows multiple restaurants to offload their entire kitchen operations and order fulfillment and delivery processes to a service provider. In that case, the menu offered to customers is delivery-optimized, where the item selection criteria are deliverability, demand, and quality.
Brito uses a high-volume, shared-space commercial kitchen that acts as a hub where food is semi-prepared and then shipped to satellite kitchens, or spokes, scattered across East Cairo to be finished and packaged for delivery.
“Over the past two decades, I have been working on developing software systems for F&B brands, and found out that there are still a lot of gaps in the foodservice sector due to the ever changing consumer behavior, and these gaps only became more visible with the Covid-19 crisis,” says Reda, CEO of Brito.
“The cloud kitchens model stood as a part of the sharing economy, defined by the utilisation of existing resources. We started Brito so we can reshape the industry by making it more profitable for restaurants to open up and expand using technology-led tools to improve scalability,” she adds.
The global cloud kitchens sector is set to be valued at $230 billion by 2025 and close to $1 trillion by 2030.
The cloud kitchen started off as a platform, serving only corporate clients before pivoting to serve both the consumer and the corporate segments. The startup now counts 72 local and international brands and looks to onboard 280 in the next four years.
According to the Brito founders, cloud kitchens can help local food brands handle better units of economics in terms of rental and labour costs and raw materials while offering more flexibility to experiment with their menu and adapt to shifting trends.
“In the restaurant industry, the margins are already super slim. Bringing overall costs down by one or two per cent makes a huge difference in terms of economies of scale. The added value of cloud kitchens has never been more pronounced in such trying times, especially the tech-led ones, because 50-60 per cent of cloud kitchen operations should be automated to ensure efficiency. At Brito, we also help our clients get better deals with food delivery aggregators and realise more revenues,” says Sadeq.
“One of the services we provide is that we help global brands expand to Egypt and take advantage of its booming delivery market. We onboarded a couple of Jordanian brands already, However, with the recent drops in pound valuation and import restrictions still in place, it is hard to attract and retain those brands,” Sadeq explains.
“For example, after the recent devaluation, we had to raise the loyalty fees to attract global businesses. So, this has put bigger pressure on us to provide real monetary value in order to have them onboard,” he adds.
