5 Challenges faced by F&B Industry in Singapore
Singapore has always been known to as the best place to begin your business. However, its not very easy to be an F&B entrepreneur. To understand this, we spoke to a few of the entrepreneur of the same sector.
The country is a center of various culture. The crowd here likes to taste different flavours. People love to try out different dishes and cuisine. Something different in the market is always welcomed with excitement. Also, it is a fact that, If the product has gotten a good demand in the Singapore market, the other Asian countries will also be willing to promote the same. Seems like opening a bar, cafe, restaurant is not as easy as it sounds to be. Lets check out a few challenges that they face:
1. The unbreakable competition
The competition in this field is immense. The industry has managed to be very competitive and saturated. Like I told you before, the crowd welcomes new dishes and cuisine happily. They are quite excited to try something new. So one major challenge is there is something new opening very frequently and if you want to have need higher retention of customers, you have to try and be different to hold their attention on you. Customers here always looking for new menus, trends and new drinks. Since the taste of customers are changing constantly, this makes the industry dynamic and only the owners who are constant development can be the king of the hill.
“The taste of the food cannot keep changing but to ensure that we can still pull our customers to us, we are going to use innovation in the industry.”
— one of the entrepreneur of the industry.
Entrepreneur’s are taking help of technology and innovation to make sure the customers are still excited to stick around with them.
2. Quality is the king’s weapon
Any industry to excel needs to ensure to deliver Quality.
Many entrepreneurs a have sleepless nights thinking on how to ensure the quality of the food has not been compromised under any circumstances. Specially in the world of social media. Anything can go viral. This can build, at the same time destroy the reputation of any brand. Destroying the name is a easier and much faster process. Hence, its important to keep this as priority to excel.
“I want to make sure the quality of service, the food and beverage in all my outlets are controlled and up to guest’s expectations.”
The quality is what matters and is directly proportionate to success.
A happy customers tells a friends and a unhappy customer tells the world.
This requires complete dedication, passion and huge amount of efforts to ensure that they are in track, due to the nature of the business.
3. Bob the builder also needed a Team
Team for every business to excel is also very crucial. We wont be able to do much if we have a great strategy and no team to execute that strategy. This challenge basically hold true for every business. But since this industry is so dynamic, you will have to ensure the players in the team are dynamic too. They are on the toes when needed. To make sure the strategy is implemented 100%. This is one of the key player along with the others to decide failure or success. Retention of customers or diversion. The success is definitely a full team effort.
Tip: Implement a daily checklist for managers and review it monthly.
4. Optimal Utilisation of Resources
Management studients must have come across this term plenty of times.
One of major need to run a successful business is proper utilisation of the resources available to the brand.
Even the slightest imbalance in this can causes a lot of difference. Here this is also one of biggest challenge that the F&B Entrepreneurs are facing. In F&B industry this aspects plays a crucial role. To make sure of this, ever month the team sits down to discuss it. They analyse the goods purchased every month and compare to needful and find out where should they invest more and where to put in less. They check out if they have ordered excessive inventory or inadequate of any that has made to lose out on business.
Inventory management has always been the biggest challenge and every month the team just tries the best to be more efficient. However, most of this work in done manually. Hence adds up to the investment of time and energy.
One such solution that founders are looking towards is automating this task.
Trying to bring in an innovative approach to manage this well. Here the team is also trained on how to ensure efficiency with quantity serving with no affect on the quality of the service.
5. Ryan, Throw the garbage out! Hold on, time to check this
There is another important aspect to this Waste Management.
The team has to ensure optimisation of waster management and how to manage the leftovers. There are plenty of questions that needs to be managed with an answer that goes green on the resource pocket of the brands. The aim of the brand is to become “green restaurant” with no leftovers and 100% recycled goods in Singapore.
With all the rental rates that pull out the majority part of the profits and as mentioned earlier the social media accounts can cause lose of potential clients. The saddening statistics is that 40% of F&B businesses don’t survive past 5 years. And the 60% that survive, the industry will push the load of worries on them.
This all due to the nature of the industry. Right from the inefficiencies that come with scaling up, to administrative work that takes more time and effort than necessary, its often operational issues that kills a business even before a negative review.
If you like this article please do like and let us know if you want to know about how to deal with such scenario or if you want us to address any of your business growth questions. You could write to us marketing@nimetler.com
