Yumi Corp will feed you when you work from home

Indonesia’s online food market has grown over the past three years with the expansion of internet infrastructure and services.

As a result, cloud kitchens have also found their place. By preparing and packing meals for homes and offices – just like regular caterers – these kitchens incur costs associated with maintaining catering services. Indonesia-based Yumi Corporation is a company that has been disrupting its business by doing so.

From catering to cloud kitchens

A.D. In 2016, Mario Santanu was a general partner of SMDV Business Capital Company, but saw a change in the food and beverage industry. Restaurants will not survive if they only have offline services. They have to go online, ”he said in a recent interview. CASIA.

Together with his brothers Marius and Marrio, he decided to start a food company called Yumi Corp. Two of his friends, Edward Kumer and Juan Chen, have joined, and the Indonesian Food and Beverage (F & B) Corporation’s Ismailia team has joined. Former employees of Yumi Corp. were part of the Ismaili food preparation department, which started the company.

Yumi Corporation was officially established in January 2017 with its staff in place. “We started with the management of a corporate catering company, because the staff did not have to go abroad to provide high quality food and lunch,” Suntanu said. . Umi has been able to sign clients such as Unilever, Wings and Jakarta to the United States Embassy.

The company soon introduced Yummybox and improved its food service. At the top level of Yumi Corporation, the company says it cooks 18,000 meals a day for its customers.

Months before the outbreak in Indonesia, Yumi Corporation went on to play a major role in the F&B sector. A.D. In 2019, Yumi Corp found one of its competitors, Berkeley, and then rolled over the cloud kitchen.

“We want to help existing restaurants grow their business in cloud kitchens,” Suntanu said.

Unlike most cloud kitchens that only provide space and equipment, Yummykitchen provides trained staff in charge of preparation and cooking. In this way, brands can save on manpower and only prepare ingredients for their menu. Yummykitchen deploys a revenue sharing model, although Santanu does not specify the exact breakdown.

Before the Covenant-19 came to the forefront of 2020, corporate food was the main source of income for Yumi Corporation. Now, with the home policy work that has stopped this Yumi operation branch, Yukichi is the backbone of the company, generating 75 percent of the company’s revenue and tripled its share of other streams during the outbreak.

“It is growing rapidly. Currently, the revenue from the cloud kitchen is very high compared to the regular food supply,” Santanu said. Makes a large cloud kitchen network.

However, Yummykitchen faces stiff competition in the cloud kitchen industry. GrabKitchen has been in operation since 2018, and Gojek has been working with Dyer Bersama (“Public Kitchen” in Indonesia) since July 2019. In fact, some of the Eucharist places are rented from Graph, another Cloud Kitchen startup Everplate Kitchens and other independent players.

We work from the environment. You can say that they provide the space while we are the operators. We use a revenue sharing model in this partnership. We also use theirs. [Grab and Gojek’s] Order and delivery service channels, so it’s more mutually supportive, ”Santanu said.

An exciting future for food orders

Yumi Corporation recently raised $ 12 million in a series B led by SoftBank Venture Asia, which is opening more cloud kitchens in Indonesia’s major cities.

Using a forecast model, Suntanu plans to reduce the service life from ten minutes to three minutes – a long order. “Usually the staff starts cooking after the order is placed. But with data analysis we can predict and pre-order the orders at some point, so drivers don’t have to wait long,” he said.

He believed that even after the epidemic subsided, the habit of ordering food online would stick with customers, promising further growth. “People spend more time at home and cook more. When they start returning to work in the office, they don’t have time to cook. So they order more food, ”said Santanu,“ it does not shrink too much, it just grows permanently.