KOCHI: As hotel owners association are reading to take the fight to restaurant listing and food delivery giants like Swiggy, Uber Eats and Zomato in the state, a home-made app - Restuka, vies for attention, offering a one-stop solution with its cloud-based restaurant management system.
Restuka claims to offer easy-to-use back end solutions pertaining to maintaining orders, stock, billing and home delivery enquiries for a restaurant. "Unlike other service providers who focus on one specific requirement, ours will offer a wholesome solution to the needs of a restaurant operator, which we believe will make it quite a compelling proposition," said Nikhil Soman, co-founder, Restuka.
To sweeten the deal, Restuka will ditch the commission model and charge a yearly subscription fee of Rs 20,000 and a monthly maintenance charge of Rs 2,000 for a restaurant to avail all its services. "We are also giving them the flexibility to either deliver the orders generated through Restuka themselves or they can avail our delivery services in areas which register high-order volumes. That too, at a nominal increase to the monthly maintenance cost proposed," said Nikhil. Restuka, is a venture developed under the Pentagent Technologies, a startup company under Kerala startup mission and DIPP Startup India.
Restuka officials says it to be actively pitching the platform to various district association in the state. "We are receiving a positive response from scores of potential clients, with many of them starting t0 enrol themselves into the platform," said an official.
Meanwhile, the Kerala Hotel and Restaurant Association (KHRA) confirmed to be in talks with a few startups in order to set up a new online app for the hotels. "We are in the process of meeting potential platform providers to discuss setting up an app which enables restaurants to process online orders at minimal service costs. We are hopeful to find the right developer in a few days time," said Azeez Moosa, KHRA President (Ernakulam district).
The association cites high commission and GST rates as one of the many reasons why they have decided to stop associating with food-delivery platforms. It is reported these firms were charging 30 per cent commission from hotel owners and 18 per cent GST for every food order.
The Kochi chapter of the KHRA has decided to observe a token strike for 10 days from December 1.
There are around 4,000 hotels under the association in Ernakulam, out of which only 50 per cent take orders from online apps. The 40,000-strong association of restaurants and hotels is also plans not to associate with existing food-delivery platforms. Currently, food delivery companies operate only in Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram and are set to launch operations in Kozhikode.