Cloud kitchens have become game-changers in the restaurant industry, being a cost-effective approach to running a delivery-only kitchen. Meanwhile, multi-brand cloud kitchens have disrupted the restaurant industry altogether because consumer preferences have evolved to desire variety. By serving customers through multiple brands from one location, multi-brand cloud kitchens have unlocked the perfect recipe to capture a wider audience while efficiently cutting down on unit costs.
Jozi Feast is one multi-brand cloud kitchen that launched itself in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2021 with the mission of offering multiple dishes from multiple destinations all under one platform.
From Thai to Indian to Mexican, and more, Jozi Feast offers a range of multicultural culinary experiences to its customers in just a few clicks. Why stick to one type of cuisine, when you could have it all with Jozi Feast?
Challenge
One challenge that comes with running a cloud kitchen is the lack of a physical presence. For this reason, all efforts go into establishing a digital presence in order to build a credible brand. This means that after launching, Jozi Feast had to ensure that they had an engaging ordering platform for their customers, such as a website and mobile app. Without a proper digital presence, there is no way for customers to engage with Jozi Feast.
Running multiple brands at once is a task in itself. Giving each brand its due visibility is an even bigger task. After launching, Jozi Feast was faced with these issues because integrating multiple brands into one single platform and providing each brand its due visibility was challenging. Building a connection between Jozi Feast as the main brand, with sub-brands such as Tikkarito and Roll With It, to name a few, was important in order to engage with customers and grow orders.
Being a new brand, Jozi Feast could not acquire the necessary rider fleet to deliver customer orders, which is why they chose to go with third-party aggregators. However, this came with a cost. Aggregators charge heavy commissions (upto 30%), cutting into Jozi Feast’s revenues, leaving the multi-brand cloud kitchen with lower profits. This was a distressing situation for the brand because relying on aggregators was not feasible for their growth and profitability.
Relying on third-party aggregators came with another caveat. Jozi Feast runs multiple brands; however, aggregators do not allow single cart ordering with one delivery fee. Ordering from different brands at once, which was Jozi Feast’s mission, was not possible through aggregators. This issue was proving to be extremely troublesome for the brand, and they were actively looking for solutions that would allow customers to order from different brands from one cart, with one single delivery fee.
Lastly, when working with aggregators, Jozi Feast was unable to gain access to their customer data, which set them back in terms of understanding who their customers are and what their preferences and behaviors are. In order to efficiently target and segment its customers, access to customer data was imperative for Jozi Feast to grow its business.
Solution
At the beginning of 2022, Jozi Feast found the answer to all their problems. By signing up with Blink, they gained access to their own branded mobile-optimized website and mobile app. The website and mobile app are under the brand name “Jozi Feast”, with their sub-brands having their own sections. With Blink, Jozi Feast was able to build a unified ordering platform for their customers.
Blink provided Jozi Feast with the solution of running multiple brands under one roof. With Blink’s single cart functionality, customers could place orders from different brands and have them delivered to their location all at once, with a single delivery fee, something that third-party aggregators could not offer.
By cutting out aggregators from the equation, Jozi Feast was able to cut down on heavy commissions paid to aggregators, because of the subscription-based model Blink runs on. By saving on these huge costs, Jozi Feast was able to increase its profitability, and incentivize its loyal customers through promotions and discounts to increase customer loyalty.
Moreover, Blink also provided Jozi Feast with full customer data ownership, allowing the multi-brand cloud kitchen to increase its customer loyalty and engagement. Now, they had the ability to send out direct emails and SMS campaigns to their customers promoting their different brands’ deals. They could even use the customer data to execute targeted campaigns on social media, an inbuilt feature that Blink provides to all its customers on the back-end portal.
Results
In the first 3 months of joining Blink, Jozi Feast was able to collect data from more than 400 customers. This was a significant starting point for the multi-brand cloud kitchen, seeing as they had zero visibility before Blink came into the picture.
Jozi Feast saw 4.7x growth in revenue from their online orders in the first 3 months, a massive achievement that could only go up from here. Their number of orders also grew by 5x during this time, and they were able to see that the duration of time spent on the platform by customers was an average of more than 5 minutes for both the website and the app. This goes to show that their digital presence was increasing as they were capable of achieving an average engagement time of more than 5 minutes.
Their re-order rate, which is the number of customers that ordered again after their first order is a massive 50%, which is something to be boastful about, considering the restaurant industry average is only 30%. They were able to achieve this retention rate because of the Blink features they have enabled, such as loyalty points where Jozi Feast can give their customers cashback offers in their e-wallets.
Jozi Feast can even collect online payments with the help of Blink’s Payment Gateway integrations with AddPay. Such features and integrations are the reason why Jozi Feast’s order ratings stand at an astonishing 4.95 rating.
Blink has been able to help multi-brand cloud kitchens like Jozi Feast not only improve their unit economics but build relationships with their customers and drive growth.
Are you looking to launch your own multi-brand cloud kitchen, or grow your existing restaurant profitability? Give Blink a try, we promise you won’t be disappointed.
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