Sweetheart Kitchen secures €15M in Series C funding
Sweetheart Kitchen, the Dubai tech-based multi-brand, delivery-only ghost kitchen, has raised €15 million (approx US$17.7M) in Series C funding from strategic investors. The new funds will be used to launch five new brands including Skinny Bowls, Open Sesame and Naughty Vegan as well as open 19 new units across UAE and Kuwait in early 2021 and planned expansion into Saudi Arabia later. This round follows an earlier €21 million funding used to launch 30 brands.
The round, backed by and led by Sweetheart Kitchen CEO, Peter Schatzberg, will fuel the vision and the company’s unique ability to leverage the best technologies to optimize the company’s food delivery supply chain. Sweetheart Kitchen is designed to allow multiple brands to operate within the same kitchen infrastructure.
“We invest most of our funding into supply chain technology, food design and hiring talent,” pointed out Schatzberg. “This will continue into 2021, as we are just fifteen months old and we are still perfecting our business model. Scaling units is certainly one important objective for us, but we are also investing in streamlining our processes and systems to achieve profitability. We look forward to even more milestones in this next stage of the company’s growth.”
In a statement to SME10X, whenever the company launches a brand, they try different food items, categories, and ingredient combinations. There is a lot of AB testing. “When you launch a new brand, you want to make sure there is a market for it and you need to be very creative. We study the existing infrastructure and kitchen capacity (ingredients, staff, space, etc to ensure that we have the right infrastructure and resources in place,” Schatzberg added.
Schatzberg believes that its business model that is in line with a global trend for ghost kitchens which is poised to be $1trillion market by 2030, allows the restaurant sector to evolve as the market and customer needs evolve. This is the only way to build a long term sustainable virtual kitchen model.
According to a new report published by Allied Market Research, the global cloud kitchen market size is estimated to reach $71.4 billion by 2027 with a CAGR of 12.0 percent from 2021 to 2027. The report, “Cloud Kitchen Market by Type, Product Type and Nature: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021–2027” adds that the bevy of choice together with margins of error and increased adoption of technology are all factors in the sector’s predicted upward trajectory.
