Bukyia is an Accra-based online marketplace connecting food brands to flexible or underutilized kitchen spaces in hotels, other restaurants, apartments, and even homes to enable food operators to get closer to clients and deliver food very fast, with minimum capital expenditure and time.
According to the startup, over 20 small restaurant owners in Ghana they interviewed spent close to a million Ghana cedis to set up a single branch. Whilst this can be less or more depending on the location and owners’ preferences, the logic is still true for all: setting up a traditional brick and mortar restaurant is expensive.
The high cost of setting up a restaurant coupled with the high operational cost in utility, salary, and other bills give restaurants less space to think ‘delivery’ and affordable pricing hence the ill off-premise dining experiences millennials face every day.
According to the company’s CEO, Nathaniel Konadu Opoku, the rise of dark kitchens globally, even amongst top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and VC firms speaks to the fact that, something is wrong with the old way of owning a restaurant.
“There is a deep logic in changing a model with high rents, where you can spend half a million cedis on a restaurant lease and refurbishment before a single customer has walked through the door.”
With Bukyia, Restaurants can now set up new locations within a week and deliver food in under 20 minutes.
How It Works
The host kitchen signs up on the Bukyia platform, gets reviewed, and has their prices negotiated.
Food vendors can then search for a match and book a facility, paying a small fee. They are provided with an onsite dispatch rider.
Customers can then order from the vendor on the Bukyia platforms or aggregator platforms.
With Bukyia’s hyper-local first-minute food delivery concept, restaurants can now cook food anywhere and still deliver to clients in real-time.
Launch
Bukyia hopes to launch next month (May) with a limited number of host and popular food brands in one of the busiest neighborhoods in Ghana.
In the long term, Bukyia plans on creating a 1000 network of remote Kitchens across Ghana in 5 years, introducing gig economy models in the restaurant and catering business, making it inclusive for women and youth with little capital and to and facilitating youth employment with the kitchen through the expansion of local food brands.
