Singapore tycoon to open 1,000 cloud kitchens across Asia

Bloomberg

Of all the ways our lives have changed during the coronavirus pandemic, few are as obvious as how, and where, we eat.
With restaurants either shuttered or reopening with vastly reduced capacity, and people staying home as second-wave outbreaks erupt, demand for food-delivery services has exploded.
Now Kishin RK, the 36-year-old heir to a multi-billion dollar Singapore property empire, is joining the fray, creating a network of 1,000 cloud kitchens across Asia, Europe and the US to crack the lucrative home-delivery dining market. Globally, cloud kitchen revenue is estimated to climb to almost $72 billion by 2027 from $43 billion last year, according to Allied Market Research.
Also known as dark or shared kitchens, these centralised operations can pump out an array of cuisines for established restaurants looking to broaden their delivery footprint, or for brands that exist nowhere else but behind an app. They’ve become the go-to model for food delivery companies looking to side-step the costs of running traditional restaurants with seating and waiters, and can be located in cheaper premises like business parks rather than high-street storefronts.
“The investment into cloud kitchens is an opportunity to look at real estate with a different lens and create revenue from a space which may not be as relevant anymore,” said Kishin, who founded TiffinLabs with three partners in early 2019, naming it after the Indian lunches delivered by the nation’s army of so-called dabbawalas.
Kishin runs RB Capital, a privately owned property firm which together with his father Raj Kumar’s Royal Holdings, owns 13 office towers, malls and hotels in Singapore, including the recently refurbished 225-room InterContinental Robertson Quay.
That has left the family, which has an estimated net worth of about $3 billion, exposed to the city-state’s struggling economy. GDP shrank by a record last quarter, when much of the city was shutdown to combat coronavirus. Kishin declined to comment on the family’s wealth.
He’s also trying to crack a crowded market. Panda Selected dominates in China, Deliveroo plans to expand its ‘Editions’ dark-kitchen concept in Europe, while Zuul and Kitchen United . are major players in the US.