Currently, the food and beverages industry is ruling the business market. You stroll on your street and see hundreds of new vendors popping up with new Food trucks, right? Even as a customer, this gets confusing sometimes: where to eat and what to get? Who is the best? It is time to stand out from the competition and start a Cloud Kitchen – a virtual solution to all your physical problems.
Here, you will get orders online; all you need to do is cook it and make the delivery. You are cutting all the hustle in between. Sounds simple! And for this, the first thing you need to do is set up your own Cloud Kitchen. This is also as simple as it sounds! Here, you will get step-by-step guidance on how to start a cloud kitchen.
Step 1: Location
Although your kitchen will appear online, you must find a place to cook and make deliveries. Many people also choose to do this from their houses. So, one way with this is you are saving up a lot of money by not investing it in or setting up a restaurant or having too many employees to deal with.
Step 2: Register Yourself Online
It would be best to integrate yourself with Swiggy, Zomato, Uber Eats, and many more platforms here. Usually, there are one-time fees you need to pay upfront, and they charge 18-30% of your order revenue per order. And since your kitchen only exists online, it is important that you also build a personal website. You can get help from local web developers for this.
Step 3: Official License
Any business requires an official license. And even though you are running a virtual kitchen, you need to officiate it. For this, you require multiple licenses: FSSAI license, Fire license, GST Registration, Municipal Health trade license, etc. And if you want to avoid investing your time into this, you can also hire an agency to do this for you. Overall, you will require Rs.10,000/- for all the permits you need.
Suggested Read: Everything You Need to Know to Equip Your Small Cloud Kitchen
Step 4: Investment
You need to figure out what you want to sell. This particular step depends on what you want to add to your menu. For example, if you’re going to sell pizzas, burgers, pasta, and Sandwiches, you need to invest around 2 Lakh Rupees. This will cover your set-up cost.
You can also look for supplies you already have or reuse to save money. Also, leave the significant expenses for the letter. To stock up the raw materials, contact your area vendors who can sell you wholesale.
If you want to set up a name for yourself, leave a separate budget on the packaging, as people keep coming to a particular brand.
Since you only exist online, it is important to take care of such measures.
Step 5: Employees
Even if you are running a cloud kitchen business, you must expand your manpower to serve customers faster. This will also help you to serve more customers and stay energized. Entry-level employees can be quickly hired, around Rs.13,000-14,000. And if you are only looking for a helper, you only need to pay up to Rs.10,000/-. So, you can divert cooking, taking up orders, and delivering parts.
Step 6: Expand:
Now that you have understood How to open a Cloud Kitchen and what steps you need to take care of, it is time to know how to expand it. For this, you need a space, a number of employees, and more items on your menu. This way, you can also build a franchise of your cloud kitchen of course, this depends on your revenue from the number 1 kitchen!
So, these are a few steps that will help you build your very own Cloud Kitchen. Apart from this, focus on the marketing aspect as well. Nowadays, everything has come on social media. Use it to your benefit and post as many posts about your food as possible. And in no time, you will be serving many customers.
Happy cooking in your Cloud Kitchen!
