Brito, an Egyptian Kitchen as a service startup, has recently announced a $1.25 million funding round to invest in its kitchen technology, expand its delivery fleet, and extend its presence in Cairo.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Brito Cloud Kitchens, founded in 2022 by Rania Reda and Mo’nes Sadeq, owns and operates a network of smartly distributed and fully operational Cloud Kitchens throughout Egypt, assisting international brands in expanding their presence and delivery to the Egyptian market in record time and with minimal investment.
Brito assists restaurants and food concepts to take advantage of a big market and expand in a smartly determined method to assure a rapid go to market, consistency of their food flavour and convenience to their new wide audience.
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A cloud kitchen, also known as a virtual kitchen or ghost kitchen, is a commercial food production facility that allows several restaurants to offload their complete kitchen operations and order fulfilment and delivery processes to a service provider. In that instance, the menu given to clients is delivery-optimized, using deliverability, demand, and quality as item selection factors.
Brito employs a high-volume, shared-space commercial kitchen that serves as a hub for semi-prepared food, which is then sent to satellite kitchens, or spokes, located around 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.”
The global cloud kitchens sector is expected to be worth $230 billion by 2025 and nearly $1 trillion by 2030.
The cloud kitchen began as a platform that only served business clients before turning to serve both consumer and corporate segments. The firm now has 72 local and international brands on board and plans to add 280 more over the next four years.
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According to the Brito founders, cloud kitchens may assist local food enterprises handle better units of economics in terms of renting and labour expenses and raw materials while allowing greater flexibility to experiment with their menu and respond to altering 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.”
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“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.
Brito cloud kitchen Brito cloud kitchen
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard