March 18, 2019, 23:13 / Business

Rosinter relies on delivery

The restaurant holding will open delivery-only establishments in 2019 Tatyana Romanova

More and more clients, including Il Patio restaurants, prefer to save time and order ready-made food at home / Evgeniy Razumny / Vedomosti

Rosinter will begin testing the dark kitchen project, i.e. restaurants operating exclusively for delivery, in the second quarter of 2019, the holding’s president, Sergei Zaitsev, told Vedomosti. Now the company, according to him, is assessing the investment attractiveness of two points and preparing them for launch. He estimates investments in each location at approximately 5 million rubles. - depending on the initial state of the room.

Rosinter Restaurants Holding is one of the largest public catering operators in Russia. At the beginning of 2019, the company operated 272 restaurants, including 108 franchised, in 27 cities in Russia, the CIS and Central European countries. Rosinter develops establishments under its own brands: “Il Patio”, “Planet Sushi”, “Shikari”, “Mama Russia”, “Ambar”, and also manages TGI Fridays restaurants, the Costa Coffee chain of coffee shops and McDonald's fast food establishments in transport franchise units. For at least the last five years, the holding has been trying to overcome the financial difficulties it has encountered: since 2012, the company’s revenue has been declining from year to year and at the end of 2017 amounted to 7 billion rubles. Among the reasons, the company cited high inflation, the adoption of a law banning smoking in public places, a food embargo and the devaluation of the ruble.

Delivery is one of the strategic priorities for the development of Rosinter, said the founder and chairman of the board of directors of Rosinter, Rostislav Ordovsky-Tanaevsky Blanco, in an interview with Vedomosti in the fall of 2018. Now this is one of the fastest growing market segments, and therefore another channel receiving additional profit - more and more people prefer to save time and order ready-made food at home, notes Zaitsev. While the share of delivery in the revenue of Rosinter city restaurants is about 8%, he noted, there are plans to at least double this figure.

If successful in 2019–2020. dark kitchen will open in those areas of Moscow where there are no corporate or franchise restaurants of the holding or delivery time from nearby establishments exceeds 60 minutes, says Zaitsev. The company is considering the northern direction of Moscow, Izmailovo and some central areas.

The most popular orders, in his opinion, will be pizza and pasta from Il Patio, burgers and snacks from TGI Fridays, Philadelphia and California rolls from Planet Sushi, tom yum soup and pho soup from Shikari. . Delivery will be handled by Yandex.Eda (the contract was concluded in the fall of 2018) and Delivery Club (since 2010), and Rosinter also has its own system - hgclub.ru. The cost of dishes in traditional restaurants and online, according to Zaitsev, will not differ. True, through Yandex.Food and Delivery Club it will not be possible to combine orders from different chains of the holding and you will have to comply with the minimum order conditions twice, a Rosinter representative clarified. For example, the minimum order at Planet Sushi and Il Patio through Delivery Club is 900 rubles, through Yandex.Food – 500 and 900 rubles. (respectively). When ordering through Rosinter’s own application, after entering the delivery address, the client will be offered all possible concepts for ordering, food from the selected establishments will be delivered simultaneously, a company representative assured.

Restaurants without halls and waiters began to open en masse several years ago - thanks to the emergence of ready-to-eat food delivery aggregators, recalls Artem Laptev, founder of the Vkuslab delivery restaurant. According to his estimates, now about 20–30% of establishments represented in Yandex.Food and Delivery Club operate according to the dark kitchen principle. More than 8,000 cafes are connected to Yandex.Food, and over 9,000 to Delivery Club, according to aggregators. According to NPD Group analysts, in monetary terms the delivery segment accounted for 6.7% of the entire Russian catering market for the 12 months ending in January 2019; it grew by 8.7%.

Own dark kitchens will allow Rosinter to optimize costs and logistics and reduce delivery times, argues food service expert of the Russian branch of NPD Marina Lapenkova: the holding has few restaurants in residential areas and there is always a risk that the order will be delivered to the client later than expected. And well-known restaurant brands in the portfolio will contribute to the development of this area of Rosinter’s business, she adds.

Demand for classic restaurants will fall, Laptev believes, and online food sales will undoubtedly grow in the next five years.