Bid adieu to dine out and give a warm welcome to dining at home. The novel coronavirus pandemic has orchestrated a huge shift in consumer behavior and made cloud kitchens popular over the restaurants. All thanks to the specially built restaurant management software like oneresto that managing cloud kitchens are now not only easier but also efficient.
Restaurants and eateries pressed the panic button as coronavirus ate their business alive during the nationwide lockdown. Close to 90% of restaurants under the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI)’s swept downed shutters due to the lockdown that started on March 25th, 2020, allowing only essential workers to operate. Now 7 months later with steady rising numbers, the general public is still keen on staying away from restaurants even though the restrictions of the lockdown have been eased. Diners have shown a propensity for takeaway options, leading a tilt towards cloud kitchens. Cloud kitchens are cooking facilities that cater only to online delivery orders and that have no physical dining space. Cloud kitchens continue to see massive growth in online orders hence also a rise in kitchen management software to ease kitchen order tracking for restaurants.
Read more: How Are Restaurant Businesses Adapting With Contact-Less Deliveries in the Post-COVID-19 Era?
Prior to the lockdown, dine-out contributed to about 70% while delivery contributed 30% in the revenue. Right now, restaurants need to use the best restaurant management software for delivery to accelerate their delivery growth to earn that revenue. The online food segment may take till December 2020 or even longer recover by 100%, in an accelerated scenario.
Research shows that online delivery has been growing at 100 % to 150% for the last four years, this number has been severely impacted due to COVID-19 due to restrictions on the number of staff. But cloud-kitchen or delivery-only food services will continue to heal faster than the dine-in restaurants and is likely to benefit more with the use of kitchen order tracking software and management software to make their time-management more efficient.
Food delivery apps are promoting the idea of hosting dinners at home and eating with families at home. This seems to be the situation for the near future because the general public will avoid restaurants for a couple of years until they are stress-free or until there’s a vaccine available. Till the time people may not be fine with dining out and the restaurants are going to have to depend massively on cloud kitchens to help recover the revenue steadily as consumers now focus more on healthy and hygienic food over anything else during the pandemic.
Though reluctant from consuming food that wasn’t prepared in their kitchen, consumers are building a trust bond with online food ordering app that promise safety, hygiene, and most importantly contactless delivery. This gives consumers the confidence to still enjoy food from outside and worry less about getting sick.