HOW INTERNET WATER CAN HELP CLOUD KITCHENS SCALE UP SMART

Fresh and clean water from a commercial water purifier is essential for the daily operations of restaurants, cafés, quick service restaurants, cloud kitchens, coffee shops, convenience stores, and other foodservice outlets. Controlling the quality of your store's water can be crucial to its brand identity and customer loyalty. While the quality of incoming water into the traditional water purifier may appear to be constant, stable, and unchanging, it varies greatly from region to region and even street to street. Unpleasant taste and look can be caused by high levels of dissolved minerals, disinfectants, and the presence of tiny solid particles. Worse still, the presence of dangerous disease-causing pathogens may find their way completely unnoticed. Untreated water can also cause internal part scaling, metal surface corrosion, and rubber component rots in foodservice equipment.

THE RISE OF CLOUD KITCHENS

In the last few years, the way we eat in restaurants has fundamentally changed, raising a lot of questions for the industry. Previously, delivery accounted for only a small portion of most restaurants' revenue. Today, customers ordering in are now making up a larger portion of most established restaurants' business— even the majority share in many cases. In the new normal, the Indian foodservice delivery market is expected to double in value to $13 billion by 2025 (according to a RedSeer report), growing at over 30 percent CAGR between 2021-26,, outperforming the overall industry, including dine-in. (According to a report by Motilal Oswal Financial Services) This changing trend has also led to the rise of ‘cloud kitchens’. According to a report by RedSeer Management Consulting, cloud kitchens are set to be a $2 billion industry in India by 2024, up from $400 million in 2019. In essence, internet, ghost, or cloud kitchens are places that don't have the physical space to serve walk-in customers and are solely focused on taking delivery orders. When compared to a dine-in restaurant, the model offers a number of advantages: it reduces rental costs, requires less capital investment to set up, and requires less manpower and overhead costs to operate. Many restaurants have shifted to the cloud-kitchen model in recent years as a result of these inherent benefits. Many first-time restaurateurs embraced the model because it reduced the cost of starting a food business. However, few survive and are able to scale up this business model. Technology, customer experience, and a streamlined supply chain are the key differentiation for a delivery kitchen to thrive or lose its foothold in a crowded space.

CHALLENGES FOR CLOUD KITCHENS:

Switching from restaurants to cloud kitchens does not imply that the operational challenges are lessened on the other side. Given the current situation, cloud kitchens face the following major challenges in order to maintain their current growth rate:

In the global food industry, food safety has always been a problem. Contaminated water, improper food handling, poor personal hygiene, poor cleaning, and sanitizing of equipment are all causes of unsafe food. Educating employees on safety precautionary measures on COVID-19 safety guidelines and ensuring that all SOPs are followed during food operations is another major challenge that cloud kitchens face.

Lack of consistent water quality. In a cloud kitchen, water is essential for maintaining hygiene and safety standards. Water is used for drinking, food preparation, beverage mixing, and as a supply for water dispensers, ice machines, and coffee machines. Water is of varying quality and consistency throughout India. Maintaining the quality consistency of water used in the outlet is one of the most obvious challenges facing the foodservice industry. This happens because the majority of the water used in this segment is mixed and varies on a regular basis. Water provided by civic bodies is frequently insufficient in areas where demand is high. This leaves cloud kitchens with no choice but to use tanker water as a supplement. It's difficult to keep this water, (which is of mixed and varying quality) within the desired parameters and completely pathogen-free on a consistent basis. In an effort to do so, most cloud kitchens purchase a commercial RO water purification system. Despite investing in a RO plant, cloud kitchens have no way of knowing whether the water is completely pure and simply rely on faith, that it is doing its job.

PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH COMMERCIAL RO WATER PURIFIERS

With commercial RO water purification systems, there is no way to guarantee the levels of water purity. Essentially, RO systems do not primarily target the removal of pathogens, but instead, reduce TDS levels. Moreover, clogged RO membranes can cause terrible taste and foul odor, in addition to breeding dangerous pathogens within the membrane, creating serious health hazards.

Another issue with RO systems is their inability to deal with fluctuating T DS levels in water owing to mixed water supply sources. The problem is compounded when a foodservice company has multiple outlets, making it impractical to check purity and TDS levels across multiple locations. It is critical to understand that changing TDS levels in water have a direct impact on the taste of foods and beverages provided in that establishment

Traditional RO plants come with a high cost of investment and require you to have a considerable budget to cover maintenance costs over the years. Not only is this a burden for most businesses, especially start-ups, but also frequent breakdowns could lead to downtime and unplanned expenses, which result in tangible and intangible losses for the business owner.

OBSTACLES TO AUTOMATION

The concept of virtual or cloud kitchens has grown rapidly in the

F&B industry around the world. Given the increased competition in this field, cloud kitchen operators must ensure that their operations are fully optimized for maximum efficiency in order to provide better service to their customers. In this era where the world is on the internet, only Internet technology can offer a full-proof technique to maintain water quality and safety. This can help win the customers’ trust, a good name in the market, as well as a proper solution to this problem of growing competitors in the business of cloud kitchens.

SCALE UP YOUR CLOUD KITCHEN WITH CLOUDTAP – INTERNET WATER

Cloudtap, a RO+UV commercial water purification solution powered by the internet and Artificial Intelligence gives cloud kitchens an uninterrupted supply of absolutely pure water 24x7, and reports purity and performance of Cloudtap installations in every cloud kitchen in real-time.

Cloudtap is the only solution in the market today which provides sensors to ensure not only the physical and chemical contaminant removal from the water but also microbiological contamination, using its proprietary PRISM technology. PRISM™ ensures that purity of water meets USFDA and EPA guidelines of disinfection. The Cloudtap purification plant with sensors continuously monitors vital water quality parameters and plant performance and sends this data to the internet-based Cloudtap engine.

The Cloudtap engine sends this data to an AI system that receives data from the plant and analyses it to ensure the water is absolutely pure. It even detects minor abnormalities which signify potential problems in the making. This results in predictive maintenance being carried out by the Cloudtap service team and eliminates the possibility of a breakdown in the future, saving time, resources, and unplanned delays

It is now possible to remotely monitor the water quality and purity of all Cloudtap installations using Cloudtap’s centralized dashboard from the palm of one’s hand. Users have 24x7 access to Cloudtap's online dashboard where they can check the water purity and plant performance of all their Cloudtap installations. This is of immense advantage to cloud kitchens whose outlets are spread across different locations.

If this sounds captivating and you'd like to learn more about how Cloudtap, India's first Internet Water can benefit your cloud kitchen, contact a Cloudtap expert at +91-22-66612300.