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Jakarta Post

Virtual restaurants, kitchens offer focused, cost-effective culinary business alternatives

Virtual is the new viral in the culinary industry, with restaurateurs focusing solely on delivery-only services and using shared kitchen spaces to cook up meals that diners purchase online.

Gisela Swaragita (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sat, April 10, 2021

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Virtual restaurants, kitchens offer focused, cost-effective culinary business alternatives

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any Indonesians aspiring to start a culinary business are shifting from the traditional brick-and-mortar concept to the virtual, because the latter is cheaper and easier to maintain. It has also proven to be more resilient as people spend more time at home amid the restrictive COVID-19 policies.

Nadhifa “Dilla” Irmadilla, 24, tried her luck in 2019 when she opened a virtual restaurant featuring her favorite ingredient: curry leaves, which she fell in love during her culinary arts program in Malaysia. Dapur Koja serves rice bowls topped with salt-and-pepper chicken or buttermilk chicken flavored with freshly picked curry leaves from her backyard.

“I started Dapur Koja at the end of 2019 in the kitchen of my parents’ house in Bintaro [Tangerang Selatan]," Dilla told The Jakarta Post on April 2. "At first, I only sold buttermilk chicken through preorders with the help of my family’s maid."

Later, Dilla signed up Dapur Koja as a merchant on GoFood, the food delivery arm of superapp Gojek, as well as on competitor Grab's GrabFood feature. She also hired a helper for another virtual kitchen she opened at her grandparents’ house in Kemang, South Jakarta, to cater to customers in Jakarta. She uses paper packaging with complimentary wooden spoons.

Dilla said that focusing on online food services and not setting up a physical establishment helped her cut capital costs. Adopting the virtual kitchen concept helped her business to be more resilient during the hard times brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Sales at all branches decreased in the first weeks of the pandemic. But it started bouncing back around the fasting month,” she said, referring to last year’s Ramadan, which started on April 23.

Today, Dapur Koja’s Kemang kitchen sells 15 to 20 rice bowls per day, while the Bintaro kitchen sells 10 to 15 rice bowls per day.

“To increase the kitchen’s online visibility, I use the Instagram Ads service. I find it very effective in increasing sales. I also ask my friends to post about Dapur Koja on their personal accounts,” said Dilla. She also took advantage of GoFood and GrabFood’s promotional schemes “to help grab customers’ attention”.

Read also: Indonesia’s $3.7b food delivery market largest in region

Going virtual has also helped Yuri Simanjuntak, who lives in Tebet, South Jakarta, to sustain Oink.id, a culinary business he founded in 2019 that specializes in crispy pork belly.

“I used to own a cafe with two friends, but the experience taught me that an [offline] food and beverage business is very complicated. Now I prefer my customers not to interact with my employees [to avoid miscommunication],” he told the Post.

An avid fan of crispy pork belly, Yuri found a market niche when he realized that South Jakarta didn’t have a pork specialty restaurant that met his standards. So he started using his home kitchen in Tebet, cooking and selling crispy pork belly based on a recipe he developed during university. His efforts were greeted with satisfactory responses from local pork lovers.

To promote his brand, he hired influencers and used Instagram meme accounts that had a large number of followers.

“Influencers give me the best ROI [return on investment],” said Yuri.

Oink.id’s official Instagram account (@oink.id), with its unambiguous username “oink.id gluttony worship.”, now has almost 12,000 followers. The virtual restaurant sells up to 150 kilograms of crispy pork belly per month via GoFood and GrabFood from its three kitchens: the flagship kitchen in Tebet, as well as two others in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta, and in Tanjung Duren, West Jakarta.

Without the operational expenses of a brick-and-mortar restaurant to maintain, waiters to pay and a printed menu to produce, Yuri uses his budget on online promotions, kitchen lease payments and utilities bills for his kitchens, and on ingredients, packaging and the wages of his five employees.

Read also: Food deliveries, online game purchases up as people stay at home during COVID-19 pandemic

Virtual kitchens, also called ghost kitchens or cloud kitchens, started cropping up in Indonesia two years ago following the boom in online food services, offering cooking facilities for aspiring virtual restaurateurs without their own kitchens.

Rival superapps Grab and Gojek also provide virtual kitchens in several cities, with Grab joining forces with one of the biggest cloud kitchens in Indonesia, Yummy Corp. The corporation runs 80 facilities in Jakarta, Bandung, Bali, Medan, Surabaya, Makassar and Malang, with merchants automatically registered into its food delivery arm, GrabFood.

“GrabKitchen also has a unique ‘all-in-one’ offering, whereby consumers can order dishes from multiple merchants based in a single GrabKitchen,” said Hadi Surya Koe, GrabFood head of marketing. “This is an attractive proposition for families and groups, and gives each merchant additional visibility and cross-promotion potential.”

Hadi said that chicken delights, coffee, healthy food, and oriental menu such as bento, rice bowl, rice box, become the most ordered food variety from the kitchens.

Meanwhile, Gojek has opened 28 Dapur Bersama GoFood facilities since July 2020 in Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, Bekasi, Medan and Bandung. These “shared kitchens” are based on a revenue-sharing model.

Rosel Lavina, the Gojek vice president of corporate affairs for food and groceries, said that 90 percent of Dapur Bersama’s 360 partners and merchants were small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

“Dapur Bersama provides comprehensive facilities for restaurants and culinary SMEs,” said Rosel, including commercial drainage systems, electricity supply and piped cooking gas.

According to Gojek data published in May 2020, on average the SMEs selling food via GoFood who joined Dapur Bersama see a 70 percent increase of transaction, thanks to integrated promotional schemes and banners shown in the app which increase their visibility.

Executive director Mohammad Faisal of Center of Reform on Economics (CORE) Indonesia said that while the virtual food service models could be a promising alternative to the dine-in model during COVID-19, culinary businesses should be ready to up their game in online promotions and develop catchy branding and product names.

“Using eco-friendly cutlery and packaging can also be a unique method to attract customers,” he suggested. Above all, he said that businesses should serve tasty foods “to be sustainable in the culinary industry”.

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