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Month: September 2021

Opening a Restaurant – Checklist

Posted on by inresto

Planning to start a new restaurant? Then don’t listen to what detractors say. Despite all the adversities posed by Covid-19, the restaurant industry remains an evergreen industry. “Restaurants are going to be back. You can’t remove restaurants from the DNA of human beings.” opines Zorawar Kalra, the Founder and Managing Director of Massive Restaurants Pvt Ltd. However, before going ahead with your restaurant plans, first, you need to prepare a checklist. It will serve as your guide in every step of your journey.

11 Key elements of a restaurant checklist

1. Set a Theme or Concept

Opening a Restaurant – checklist

Many of the successful restaurant concepts of the 70’s and 80’s no longer exist. Trends will come and go. However, to stay in business, you need to come up with a fresh and evergreen concept. Do proper market research. Find out the cuisines most liked by diners. Learn from the failures of other restaurants and study where they have gone wrong. Explore ideas not tried by many and come up with a novel concept.

2. Competitor Analysis

Collect detailed information about competitors in your surroundings. Some of them may be doing well. Check the factors that contributed to their success. You can follow suit and even do better than them. Although they may be others who are struggling, you can learn not to make the same mistakes. 

3. Choose the Right Location 

Who are your target customers? Before deciding on the location, take this aspect into consideration. If you plan to start a fast-food joint, setting up your restaurant in a posh locality would be a sheer waste of money. It would be ideal to house your fast food venture in an area crowded with schools and colleges. Deciding on the location keeping in mind your target audience is key. Also, keep your rental budget in mind. As per the report by Restaurant India, the rentals for Indian restaurants have shot up by 40 to 45%. Paying high rentals can burn a hole in your pocket, especially in these pandemic times. 

4. Write a Robust Business Plan 

A business plan is a roadmap for your restaurant. You need to have a solid business plan to get funding from investors, allocate budgets, and hire employees. Hence, ensure that your business plan consists of the three main aspects, the executive summary, company description, and market analysis. Also, keep a note of your concept, the location, and the number of profits you expect to make each year.

5. Meet your Investors 

Generally, it takes somewhere between 1 to 2 years for a restaurant to break even. Hence, have a clear idea about the start-up capital and working capital. Now that you have a business plan in place, the next step is to meet investors. To get investors on board, be ready with all the required paperwork. Your investor may be a bank, a small business bureau, or a private investor. Irrespective of the type of investor, ensure that you neatly organise all the papers in folders. It makes the job of going through the documents easy for investors. 

6. Get the Necessary Licenses 

Now, the next step is to procure the required licenses. For starting your restaurant in India, it is mandatory to get the following licenses. 1. FSSAI License from Food Safety and Standard Authority of India 2. Liquor License (if your restaurant serves liquor) 3. Health/Trade License 4. Eating House License 5. Shop and Establishment License 6. Fire Safety License 7. Lift Clearance 8. Music License 9. Certificate of Environmental Clearance 10. Signage License.

7. Hire the Best Employees 

A good bunch of employees can uplift your restaurant’s reputation enormously. Hire an experienced head chef who can manage your kitchen operations seamlessly. Also, you need a team of efficient waiters, front-of-the-house staff, busboys, kitchen staff, etc. Advertise your employee requirements in newspapers, job portals, social media, etc. Once you have hired your employees, the next step is to train them. Conduct regular training sessions and hand over the training manual to your employees. Make your employees learn the art of upselling dishes and other smart techniques. Not to forget, your staff needs to be trained on the importance of following Covid-19 protocols issued by the Government of India. 

8. Create a Menu

A menu is a major attraction to your restaurant. Develop a stellar menu that lowers food costs and boosts your profits. Also, keep the size of your restaurant kitchen in mind while building your menu. Have discussions with consultants and the chief chef before finalising your menu.   

9. Buy the Right Equipment

Depending on the dishes prepared and the number of diners you plan to serve at a time, the cooking equipment also varies. Research on where you can buy good quality equipment at low prices. Also, explore the option of buying second-hand cooking equipment from auctions or stores.

10. Plan and Strategise the Opening

Now, it’s time to publicize and market your restaurant brand. Divide your restaurant’s inauguration function into two phases. First, arrange a soft launch. Then, invite your family members, friends, and relatives. Collect their feedback and improve your shortcomings. A few weeks later, announce a grand inauguration by inviting a huge crowd.

11. Market your Restaurant 

Make use of offline marketing methods such as publishing ads in newspapers, billboards, notices, etc. Have a robust website for your restaurant: upload photos and videos of your restaurant’s inauguration. Also, build your restaurant’s official Facebook and Instagram pages. With inresto restaurant marketing solutions, run marketing campaigns at very low costs. Announce the discount offers and festival offers through your website and social media platforms. Also, post photos of mouth-watering dishes that will make it irresistible for customers to visit your restaurant.   

Parting Words

Opening a restaurant is not a simple task. Once the restaurant is up and running, the venture demands hard work and team effort. Especially in the post-pandemic world, lockdowns and regulations imposed by authorities are posing major challenges for restaurateurs. The 11 points discussed above will be of immense help while setting up your restaurant. 

Top Challenges Faced by the Restaurant Industry in the UAE and How to Overcome Them

Posted on by inresto
Top Challenges Faced By The Restaurant Industry In UAE And How To Overcome Them

The restaurant industry in UAE has never gone through such a bad phase. The sharp fall in sales and stringent restrictions on in-dining have made the going tough. As per Prakash Adtani, owner of Dubai restaurant Tum Tum Asia, in 2020, an emergency fund helped him survive the testing times. Just like him, many restaurateurs got through the challenges of 2020 and emerged stronger. Here’s how you can too:

Top 4 challenges faced by UAE restaurants and how to overcome them

1. Sky-high rentals 

In these times, you just cannot afford to pay huge rentals. As per the data by consultancy Restaurant Secrets, the average rent for a prime location from Dubai to Jumeirah can cost you anywhere between $70 to $275 per square foot. It’s too expensive, as even an average restaurant requires a space of 1500 to 5000 square feet.

Solution

Does shifting to a nearby location affect your sales? Consider factors such as your target customers, cost of procurement, and your menu prices. If none of these factors pose a threat, then the best move would be to shift your restaurant. Look for a building, a location where rentals are low. 

2. High food costs 

Are you worried about the surge in prices of food materials? When compared to last year, the prices of wheat have shot up by 30%. For soybeans, it’s a whopping 80%. (Source: Gulfnews). A rise in the cost of raw materials reduces the profit margins, and it becomes a challenge for restaurateurs. 

Solution 

The first step in saving costs of food material is by reducing wastage. With inresto SCM, India’s leading digital inventory management platform, you can cut down food wastage to the minimum. You can track your inventory levels in real-time from any location. It sends you real-time alerts when you are about to run out of stock of any item. Once you place the fresh order, the stock levels get updated automatically. 

Any kind of pilferage and theft can also be avoided with this technology solution. In short, the SCM software helps you compensate for the rise in food prices.

This way, you can enjoy huge cost savings in terms of overall grocery costs.

3. Drop in the number of tourists 

Of late, are you experiencing a sharp fall in tourist visitors? Post the outbreak of the second wave of Covid-19, UAE has imposed strict restrictions on tourists traveling from other countries. Hence, unlike earlier times, you cannot expect tourists from different parts of the world to visit your restaurant.

Solution  

Increase your local customer base. With effective customer retention techniques like loyalty programs and campaigns, you can keep your local customers coming back for more. 

Also, with the UAE and Israel signing the Abraham Accord, the peace pact, you can expect a huge number of Israeli tourists visiting the UAE. So adding Kosher food to your menu can attract a lot of Jewish tourists. Also, keep a check on dishes that have not found favour among your diners. With inresto POS, now you can easily find out the most selling and non-performing items. The software provides you with reports with which you can analyse your customer base and performance. Based on the results, you can keep your focus on the relevant things like top-selling dishes and remove those least-selling ones from your menu. 

4. High aggregator commissions 

Do you feel the pinch of excessive commissions charged by third-party food delivery firms?. As per Bhanu Pratap Rathore, managing partner at GrowthX Advisors, the food aggregators in UAE charge up to 35% on order. Paying such huge commissions can make a major dent in your profit margins. 

Solution 

Let customers order their favourite dishes directly from your restaurant. Thus, launch your restaurant’s own food delivery platform. Technology partners like inresto can build a personalised website for your restaurant. 

  • Share the news of the launch on your restaurant’s official Facebook and Instagram pages. 
  • Hire a team of efficient delivery staff to deliver the food to customers’ doorstep. Prompt delivery and excellent service will help you earn a reputation in the market. 
  • Entice your diners with personalized offers on the website. For, e.g., offering 25% off on online orders only through your website can attract many customers, and you will avoid aggregator commissions. While offering discounts, notify your customers through real-time push notifications. Also, you will avoid customer complaints on delayed delivery, rude behavior due to third-party delivery staff, etc.   

Parting Words

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. The saying holds quite true for UAE restaurants. The diners have become very demanding. By clinging to the traditional systems, you can no longer make profits. Therefore, it’s imperative to offer both in-dining and online ordering facilities. With a modern-day digital restaurant management system, provide your customers with an exceptional dining experience. In addition to catapulting your sales, it also helps you gain the upper hand over your competitors.  

How to Save Time and Money in the Food Truck Business

Posted on by inresto

Every food truck business may be unique in its offerings, but there is one thing that binds all of them: the better the time management, the greater the profit. As quick-serve food outlets, food trucks are dependent on growth by increasing their sales amount in each period. 

Want to learn how to save time and money in the food truck business? Here are a few pointers that will enable you to accomplish this objective and much more!

1. Online Orders: Future of Food Trucks

If you’re an upcoming food truck, it is crucial that you build your own digital menu using inresto’s Online Order. . This allows you to book and deliver customer orders at lightning-fast speeds.

The feature not only reduces your order and delivery times, but it also lets many more customers check your menu and order their favourites. So, your customers will be able to say goodbye to the long queues near your food truck with new tech. Further, they can pre-order to get their food at the right time! Say hello to satisfied customers!

2. Point-of-sale (POS) Apps 101

The restaurant industry is adapting to the new business dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic by becoming heavily dependent on novel technology. POS apps are the best examples of the “new normal” that’s quickly becoming the sole mode food truck operations can use. 

POS apps enable a holistic new approach to business by merging all aspects of your business in a sustainable and profitable vision. You may ask, how to save time and money in the food truck business. For this purpose, you must ensure your staff knows how to operate these systems by training them properly. As a result, when your chefs receive and prepare timely orders, your reception can use your POS to book and track multiple orders. 

3. From Consumers to Marketers

In the age of social media, new-age marketing is being replaced by simple yet effective tactics. For instance, entrepreneurs are counting on a vast virtual audience to maximize brand outreach. This way, they can cut those huge marketing campaigns costs and take their brand to new audiences.

Along with excellent customer reviews, setting up social media pages and events lets you influence your way into becoming the next big food truck in town. 

In short, happy tummies are essential. For that, you need to stay on top of your main game: food. By delivering the taste and quantity you guarantee every time, you become worthy of your name. Add to that smooth, receptive, and timely delivery, and you get a loyal customer base.

4. Think Out of the Box

How to Save Time and Money in the Food Truck Business

The key word is ‘think’.  As a restaurant owner, here are some questions you need to mull over:

  • How to save time and money in the food truck business, that too in resource- and cash-crunched milieus? 
  • Is using eLearning to train restaurant staff a viable option for you? 
  • How does that change your recruitment and resource allocation criteria? 
  • What must stay, and what must go? 
  • How do you balance the old normal with the new?
  • How experimental should you get?

Adaptability is the key to future growth of food truck businesses. If your focus is on keeping your customers happy, satisfied, and loyal, all your operations should revolve around it. So, you should think about reaching your audience through novel means. Reaching a virtual audience will hardly require as much money as technical expertise. Further, you can hire them to get you the desired results.

Food truck businesses may struggle with plenty of problems as they seek the right kind of employees who are willing to work hard and more hours than usual. We urge you to keep in mind the suggestions given below. That will help you retain capital while giving your employees the best possible training in a contactless manner. 

5. Consider Training your Staff

If you are open now, you must go through any required recruitment considering experience and ability. Thereafter, you can hold online tutorials for all your departments and employees where you explain the method of using your POS system.

6. Buy Wise, Save More

Experts claim that it is more prudent, at least now, that browsing the prices and quality of various brands before deciding on the right inventory for the job is critical. This important step is also where you can use some expertise to sieve out the slightly overpriced brands. After all, a penny saved is a penny earned.

Look at your garnish. Are you giving a huge sprig of parsley to finish off a dish? Instead, try a celery leaf. Also, pineapple leaves are a great alternative to mint.

7. Nothing Goes to Waste

A lot of food trucks fail to leverage the full potential of their inventory. This fact is evidently surprising when you look at what is transferred to the bin; a lot of these ‘wastes’ aren’t wastes at all. They can be used innovatively to spruce up your dishes and even create entirely new ones. 

For example, many veggie bits and ends make amazing broths, soups, noodles, and wraps. Even fruit ends can go into the mixer/grinder and into heavenly desserts.

As far as cooking is concerned, you are in the hands of your team of chefs. Make it clear to them that every bit of an ingredient is important. That’ll separate you from the competition. 

8. Check the Quantity

As your orders get packed more often than served, it is extremely important that you pack the right portions into each order: no more, no less. The easiest option is to use the right technical equipment to sort out the right food quantities. Then, put them into sanitized containers, double pack them, and send them to the delivery people. 

Final Remarks

This list can go on and on. However, the suggestions above shed some much-needed light on the future of food truck businesses. This article answers some important questions on ways to save time and money in the food truck business. We hope this article helped you get the results you want.

Advantages of a Mobile Inventory Management System

Posted on by inresto

Data is the most crucial aspect when it comes to managing businesses and large industries. There is an ever-growing need for keeping track of customers’ experiences and feedback. In such times, a fast and efficient inventory system will prove to be beneficial. This helps you in maintaining a record of  what are your best and worst selling dishes and many more. In this guide, we are going to discuss why you need a mobile inventory management system and what are its advantages.  

Advantages of a Mobile Inventory Management System

Why do you need a Mobile Inventory Management System?

You might be wondering, “Why do you need a mobile inventory management system?”. Well, this is a general concern and nobody is going to judge you for that. The mobile inventory system is relatively new as compared to other methods of inventory management. Users are still slowly becoming familiar with these systems but are likely to need some guidance along the way. Currently, mobile inventory systems are a need for every business that requires higher efficiency.

As the other methods of inventory management are becoming obsolete with the advent of technology in every field, mobile and mobile-based service software are getting more relevant. In the next section, we will discuss the various benefits of using mobile inventory management systems.

Benefits of Mobile Inventory Management System

Mobile inventory management system is the present technology that offers great advantage over all other prior methods of tracking inventory. It provides various perks like very low or minimal hardware cost and easy to store data as it comes with an online cloud storage facility, is highly productive and more in sync. Let’s have a look at the key benefits of mobile inventory management system:

1. Lowers Hardware Cost

Your mobile inventory system helps your business save a lot of costs spent in buying the hardware for entering and storing all your inventories. Having a mobile inventory enables the company to download a specific software in each employee’s cell phones for managing the inventory and updating it remotely. This not only helps in saving a lot of cost but also increases the efficiency of your work as it’s easier for your employees to update it from anywhere at any point of time. 

The apps dedicated to inventory management have a very simple user interface and can be downloaded by the employees easily, which ultimately results in saving a lot of hardware costs. inresto’s restaurant supply chain management tool is one such technology. With this tool, you can easily track your inventory and ensure you manage your inventory across multiple locations efficiently. 

2. Helps you Stay Relevant

Slowly, technology is becoming an integral part of different businesses and corporate houses to support the ever-changing needs of consumers all over the world. It is really important to sync yourself with the changes happening around. Industries at present need dynamic solutions to the different aspects of everyday management and its working. 

In inventory management, you need a quick solution that saves a lot of time, is highly effective and efficient, totally foolproof, and runs smoothly. So, the mobile inventory management system is the perfect option as it ticks all the above-mentioned boxes and helps you stay relevant to your customers and crush your competition. 

3. Saves Time 

The old methods of inventory management are very time consuming as compared to the present ones. In old methods, you need to purchase dedicated software and hardware to get the updated technology and even require to mobilize and train your employees to work on this system. As employees were not familiar with the older system, the chances of human error were also high.  

The mobile inventory system is easy to use compared to the older system of inventory management as most of the employees are familiar with the mobile devices and can simply operate the easy-to-use inventory apps on their respective devices. The apps can be installed in the devices/ mobile phones of the staff and the work can be done effortlessly, that saves a lot of time and energy.

4. Improves Productivity

Adopting a mobile inventory system can create wonders for you by increasing your productivity significantly in a very short span of time. Usually, all your staff would carry their mobile phones with them, and as a result, the inventory can be filled and updated from any location quickly and directly.

The staff can also update the inventory from their respective fields and make the process easy and simple. Likewise, all the staff will be updated constantly about every aspect of inventory and will be able to access data at the click of a button. Hence, this will help the management to easily access and analyze the data and give you an upper hand over your competitors.

5. Cloud Storage

One of the major problems of keeping an inventory management system is the storage of data. In inventory management, when we need to keep a track of day-to-day affairs, the accumulated data, over a while, becomes large and difficult to store. With traditional inventory systems, the chances of it being lost in the storage or getting damaged are also high. 

Using mobile inventory systems make it easy to store data by providing online cloud storage support. With this cloud storage facility, you can save hardware cost, access data remotely, and ensure high data security and integrity with very few chances of losing data. 

Final Remarks

As restaurant owners, we’re sure you know that it’s important to maintain an inventory management system for your businesses. These systems help in the proper management of things as it tracks everything. 

Mobile inventory management systems are the modern solution for maintaining an inventory system. It is very beneficial as it saves time, boosts efficiency, controls cost, and offers many other advantages. We hope this detailed guide will help you in understanding this system in a better way.