"Restaurants to re-employ 1 million people by 2021," report

Restaurant industry has faced a lot in 2020 and going forward the effect would be huge. From top restaurant group like deGustibus Hospitality that owns brands like Indigo, Neel, Dakshin Rasoi to name a few are struggling to win back diners to brands like Smoke House Deli shutting shop at Connaught Place and Inderjeet Banga closing his famous restaurant Pra Pra Prank, restaurants have seen it all with almost 30% restaurants and bars shutting their shop.

In 2020, close to two million professionals faced loss of livelihood due to the pandemic. The restaurant industry is expected to bounce back to its full glory by re-employing approximately 1 million people by 2021, shared a report. There will also be a paradigm shift in food consumption as people are looking at healthier choices with with 45% of young adults making healthier food choices by 2021.

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The report released by Restaurant reservation platform, Dineout also mentioned that a, “whopping 90% of the restaurants will adopt digital menus by 2021, and 100% of them will prefer contactless/digital payments.”

Also, as more and more are looking at ordering their food at comfort of their home or picking it up from their nearest outlet, takeaway & delivery will grow exponentially by 15% & 30.5%, respectively, added the report.

“What we’ve learned from 2020 is to be always prepared for the future. Restaurants are now more inclined towards owning the consumer data, which will only rise with the changing strategy in 2021,” shared Ankit Mehrotra, Co-founder & CEO of Dineout.

The report also shared that cloud kitchens which have a current market share of 13% will increase to 30% in the coming year. And, about 90% of the reservations will be made through online channels.

"When lockdown started, there was panic industry-wise. In the cloud kitchen space, we saw this as an opportunity to scale our customer reach as no one could step-out to eat, so we took it upon us to deliver the food to them. And in a few months, we witnessed many restaurants restricted to only brick and mortar models now entering the cloud kitchen space. Restaurants have now learned that there needs to be an alternate source to generate revenue, and cloud kitchen is one of them,” said Aayush Agrawal, Founder at Lenexis Foodworks Pvt Ltd that owns Wok Express.

Other findings of the report include, restaurants preferring their own website and owning customer data rather than depending on third party aggregators.

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“Digital ordering & payments have allowed us to work more efficiently with a reduced time spent by service teams on manual processes like order entries, order changes, billing, and settlements.  Service teams are always on standby for help so that customers still feel a sense of hospitality in addition to the safety they feel with these new systems,” added Annie Bafna, Owner, Nutcracker, Mumbai.