Helping Food Vendors Start Delivery-Only Restaurants With Zero Capital
Sept. 22, 2022, 1:30 p.m.
An innovative kitchen startup, Bukyia, seeks to help food vendors start delivery-only restaurants with zero capital, minimal effort, and time. Bukyia, founded by Nathaniel Opoku, is powering the expansion of local food brands through its distributed network of staffed or private remote (ghost) kitchens powered by advanced technology. With its model, caterers, chefs, and local restaurants reach their customers in their neighborhoods on time without high overhead.
The startup’s founder, Nathaniel, is a thought leader and foodie who wants his food delivered quickly. In 2017, he organized one of the biggest SDG events in Kumasi and several other impactful events until he decided to transition into the business from active work in the nonprofit sector.
Whiles in the university, he would order food almost every day, and it took several hours for it to be delivered. So he and his colleague (Bernice) decided to find out the root cause of the issue. They interviewed players across the delivery chain (from delivery guys to restaurants) and found the complex problem. Thousands of cedis are spent only on finding a space before customers walk in. This affected how they scaled and got closer to consumers; so they built Bukyia to allow these vendors to start, grow and expand their restaurants with little to no capital. In January this year, The duo launched a typical food delivery model, which has helped them to understand user preferences and geographic ideals.
Bukyia started its operations with 15 vendors, and its delivery time was less than 30 minutes. Now, as they scale to more customers, the startup realizes how hard it is for them to take up more orders for delivery because of the model they practice and their kitchen setup. Riders also lose out because of the distances involved and high fuel prices. In short, the current restaurant setup and the system are not optimized for delivery. Everything involved is too expensive, so Bukyia is looking to build a new restaurant with its kitchen and everything that comes with it for quick deliveries.
“Bukyia is on a journey to make it easy for anyone to open a delivery-only restaurant that works without thinking of renting a commercial space to pay huge sums in advance. We are building our mobile ordering technology and soon a physical kitchen powered by our data, domain knowledge, and technology,” Nathaniel stated.
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“It works simply: Our kitchen, Our Labour, Our technology, and your (partners) recipe or food. This means we can handle the cooking end to end for delivery on behalf of our partners, or they transport portions to our kitchen for online consumers. This way, we only have to fire, package, and deliver. We are currently testing the latter while carrying out the typical and usual food delivery business alongside.”
Bukyia’s platform also acts as a social commerce. The company has designed the platform to be interactive because they want to simulate physical interactions that happen onsite (inside restaurants) online.
“You will likely build a relationship with the vendor or other people in the restaurant. So our platform enables people to interact with each other- starting with vendors.”
“What we are building at Bukyia is not another food delivery app; we are building a platform that will make delivery work quickly. Our product philosophy is to integrate any food app or product that works into our tech infrastructure and make it accessible to our vendors in our kitchen(s) built, set up, and optimized for quick delivery. It is an infrastructure play than an app.”
Bukyia looks forward to opening its kitchen and launching unique cuisines officially. They also have BNPL and other exciting features in their BukyiaPay service that is in the pipeline.
Additionally, Bukyia would be physical and accessible, delivering authentic and budget-friendly meals across cities in Ghana within 15-20mins. Furthermore, the foodtech startup is seeking investors that believe in its vision to help them build cloud kitchens that work for Africa.
Bukyia currently works with 33 vendors and is testing different cloud kitchen models with each.
tag: Africa, technology, Business, Startup, foodtech,
Verny Joy Author
Verny loves to write poetry, fiction and quotes. Her love for writing landed her in journalism. She loves gadgets and travelling to explore new places.