Indonesia’s online food delivery market has grown over the past three years with the expansion of internet infrastructure and services.
As a result, cloud kitchens have also found their place. By preparing and packaging meals delivered to homes and offices – just like regular caterers – these kitchens eliminate the costs associated with maintaining catering services. Indonesia-based Yumi Corporation is a company that has been disrupting business by doing just that.
From food delivery to cloud kitchens
In the year In 2016, Mario Santanu was a general partner in the commercial capital company SMDV, but saw a change in the food and beverage industry. Restaurants will not survive if they only have offline services. They have to go online,” he said in a recent interview. CASIA.
Together with his brothers Marius and Marbio, he decided to open a catering company called Yumi Corp. Two of his friends, Edward Kumar and Huan Chen, joined, and they got the backing of Indonesian food and beverage (F&B) corporation Ismaya Group. Yumi Corp’s early employees were part of Ismaya’s culinary division, which gave the company its start.
With the staff in place, Yumi Corporation was officially established in January 2017. “We started with the management of a corporate catering facility, providing employees with high-quality food and not having to go out to look for lunch,” Suntanu said. . Yumi has been able to sign prestigious clients such as Unilever, Wings and the United States Embassy in Jakarta.
Soon after, the company revamped its food service by introducing Yummybox. At Yumi Corporation’s peak, the company said it cooked 18,000 meals a day for its customers.
Months before the outbreak in Indonesia, Yumi Corporation went further to grab a large share of the F&B sector. In the year In 2019, Yumi Corp acquired one of its competitors, Bericich, and subsequently rolled out its cloud kitchen, Yumicich.
“We want to help existing restaurants grow their business with cloud kitchens,” Suntanu said.
Unlike most cloud kitchens that only provide space and equipment, Yummykitchen provides trained staff to oversee food preparation and cooking. This way, brands can save on manpower and only have to prepare ingredients for their menus. Yummykitchen deploys a revenue-sharing model, though Santanu didn’t reveal the exact breakdown.
Before Covid-19 came to define most of 2020, Yumi Corporation’s main source of income was corporate food service. Now, with the home policy work that has stopped this branch of Yumi’s operations, Yumikichin is the backbone of the company, generating 75 percent of the company’s revenue, and will triple its share during the pandemic as other streams shrink.
“It will grow fast. Currently, the revenue from cloud kitchen is very high compared to the revenue from regular food delivery,” Suntanu said. Yummykitchen now has 70 outlets in Jakarta, Bandung and Medan. This count is more than Grab’s 48 locations and Gojek’s 27, which is Yummy Corporation in Indonesia. It makes the big cloud kitchen network.
However, Yummykitchen faces tough competition in the cloud kitchen industry. GrabKitchen has been around since 2018, while Gojek has been operating Dapur Bersama (“Public Kitchen” in Indonesian) since July 2019. In fact, some of Yumikichi’s spaces are leased from Grab, another cloud kitchen startup Everplate Kitchens, and other independent players.
We work from their environment. You could say they provide the space while we have the operators. In this partnership we use a revenue sharing model. We use theirs too. [Grab and Gojek’s] Ordering and delivery service channels, so it’s more interdependent,” Suntanu said.
An exciting future for food ordering
Yumi Corporation recently raised $12 million in Series B led by SoftBank Ventures Asia, which is opening more cloud kitchens in major cities in Indonesia.
Using a predictive model, Suntanu plans to reduce service times from a ten-minute ceiling to a three-minute ceiling — a tall order. “Usually, the staff starts cooking after the order is entered. But with data analysis, we can predict the orders at a certain time and prepare them in advance, so the drivers do not have to wait a long time,” he said.
He believed that the habit of ordering food online would stick with customers even after the epidemic subsided, promising further growth. “People cook more because they spend more time at home. When they start back to work in the office, they don’t have time to cook. So they order more food,” Suntanu said. “It doesn’t decrease very much, but it grows steadily.
