Cloud restaurant company CloudEats is changing how Filipinos enjoy their favorite meals through a blend of innovative technology, food science, and precise service, bringing the restaurant experience straight to their homes and beyond.
Picture this: you’re craving a nice meal after a long day at work or while watching your favorite show on a slow weekend, but don’t want to go through the effort of whipping something up; so you decide to order food, let’s say a burger, that looks delicious on a delivery flier or website; but when it arrives, you find that it’s not in the most optimal condition and it doesn’t look (or taste) like the kind of feast you envisioned for yourself.
It’s a scenario that many of us have experienced at least once or twice. CloudEats, Southeast Asia’s largest cloud restaurant group, has been working to change this reality. Through seamless integrations with leading technology platforms, most notably the region’s popular superapp, Grab, and its own trailblazing operations, the group ensures that customers get quality food in pristine condition and optimal temperatures whenever and wherever they need it. Recently, it even won several accolades at the Golden Grab Awards 2024, including Ads Trendsetter, Best Limited Time Offer (through its concept Burger Beast), and Notable Campaign (for Rhian Ramos Healthy Appetite’s “Sexy Summer” campaign).
The awards are testament to its commitment of not only providing Filipinos with quality food options, but also crafting memorable dining experiences that push the envelope of the Food and Beverage industry. Lifestyle Asia got a chance to speak to CloudEats co-founder and CEO Kimberly Yao, looking back at how far the company has come, its recipes to success, its powerful partnership with Grab, and the impact of the digital dining landscape in today’s world.
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Going Digital
Made up of over 50 in-house brands spanning more than 15 types of global cuisines, CloudEats specializes in virtual food concepts—a variety of brands whose dishes pass through a centralized commissary without actually having physical restaurants or dining spaces. In other words, its offerings are built with deliveries in mind.
“Customers discover us through Grab, and they’re able to order from a variety of cuisines,” Yao explains. “All of those brands are cooked in one location, which we manage. So the staff, the equipment, everything in the kitchen, is managed by us, and the Grab riders come and pick up the orders and deliver them to the customers.”
The group handles a wide assortment of celebrity food concepts and familiar favorites to the delivery-savvy diner. These include Burger Beast, Jjiang, Bolzico Beef to Go, Com Tam Ngon, 24/7 Wings, Casa Crawford, Pia’s Kitchen, Daks Shawarma, and Rhian Ramos’ Healthy Appetite. Every brand is built from the ground up, concept to execution—something that Yao takes great pride in, as it helps them curate the best experiences possible for their customers.
Setting up CloudEats was a natural next step for Yao, a longtime entrepreneur with a passion for technology. She learned a lot from past experiences, as the restaurant group is not her first foray into the Food & Beverage (F&B) industry. Earlier in her career, she helped build a range of hospitality and food concepts, including the famous The Palace Manila in Bonifacio Global City, a fixture of the Manila nightlife. Then in 2017, she began what one might call the spiritual predecessor of CloudEats: Boozy, a popular online liquor delivery service where customers can order and receive their choice of drinks anywhere in Metro Manila.
“We were a very small team: four people in a small office with monoblock chairs and liquor in the back,” Yao shares. Yet the business was a big hit, so much so that she eventually sold it to a large liquor conglomerate in 2019.
She continues: “Boozy was really my first foray into tech. I think what really got me hooked was how fast you can scale a business with technology.” Shortly after her exit with Boozy, she met Iacopo Rovere, a fellow entrepreneur who introduced her to the possibility of virtual restaurants well before the life-changing COVID pandemic happened, eventually co-founding CloudEats with Yao.
So began their venture into the multi-brand, digital landscape of dining, a form that would give them the flexibility needed to succeed and provide customers with exactly what they crave in the best possible way.
A Recipe for Success, A Partnership of Growth
Yao looks at three main things when it comes to managing CloudEats’ daily operations and curating brands, and these have led the group to become what it is today in such a short amount of time. Beyond selling convenience and service, the brand provides customers with what they need and want: quality food that offers something new or relevant at the right time.
The company sees what’s trending in the foodie sphere, improves on their best-sellers, and finds opportunities in what Yao refers to as “underpenetrated” cuisines—cuisines that are in high demand, but aren’t very accessible at the moment. She cites their health-centered food options as an example of this, such as Healthy to Go and 24/7 Super Healthy.
“Healthy food, especially coming out of the pandemic, became so important to Filipinos,” she states. “So we created brands that address that. Our brand 24/7 Super Healthy is one of the fastest growing brands on Grab. It’s actually become our biggest brand by volume. Really it’s being driven by the fact that it’s convenient. You can order it 24/7, so even at 2:00 a.m. if you want to have an eggplant katsudon bowl with quinoa and cauliflower, you can have that. And the price is very, very good; it’s something that you can afford to eat every day.”
This is where the restaurant group’s partnership with Grab becomes an invaluable one: data. CloudEats is able to provide the best customer experiences they can with the help of Grab’s detailed, in-depth statistics. “They give us a wealth of information about our past performance, and also about Grab’s future plans, which helps us build campaigns that are the most effective, highest return, bank for the buck,” Yao elaborates. After all, spectacular execution isn’t possible without a goal or direction. “Imagine your car’s a Tesla, and you’re driving really fast but don’t know where you’re going. You’re just a fast car.” Through Grab, the CloudEats is a fast car with a state-of-the-art GPS system unlike any other—and that makes a world of a difference.
“Here we have a very laid out plan that’s backed by historical data that they’ve been so generously sharing with us, and it helps us to plan for the future,” she adds.
On receiving recognition from their longtime partner in the Golden Grab Awards 2024, Yao makes sure to credit her team for the unprecedented success that CloudEats has experienced thus far. “I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved. I think in a short period of time, it’s so overwhelming to be on stage, on the same platform as the country’s big names.”
Transporting And Transforming The Restaurant Experience
Yao admits that there was some fear and uncertainty on how the world of delivery-based F&B would fare after the pandemic, when contactless dining became a necessity. Though now, everyone can see that it’s here to stay, having become an inextricable part of the fabric of daily life.
So the better question would be, how do companies like CloudEats improve on an existing system? The answer would be by transforming food delivery into a personalized, optimized experience where the line between dining at a restaurant and ordering from wherever you are is blurred.
To do this, CloudEats has a dedicated research and development team led by seasoned chef, Carlo Miguel, whose vast experience in the fine dining and F&B industry as a whole has been a guiding force in the creation of food that looks good and tastes good, even when it’s being transported long distances. Take a burger from the group’s concept Burger Beast: they feature Hokkaido milk bread buns that are made to absorb the juices from the patty and stay firm, preventing it from becoming soggy. From special packaging to real-world testing, it’s the little details like this—applied to every dish—that make CloudEats a cut above the rest.
“We’re very, very obsessed with the product. So we make sure it’s as if you sat in a restaurant, ordered a burger, and ate it fresh,” Yao explains. “We want to bring that casual dining experience to your home.”
While eating in a physical restaurant will always have a special place in people’s lifestyles, food delivery also has a role to play. Some might mistakenly lump it with “fast food,” perhaps think of it as an endeavor that’s devoid of the interaction and soul that make dining in person meaningful: yet CloudEats and Grab prove that this is far from the truth by transforming the way Filipinos perceive ordering meals.
The restaurant group continues to explore what digitalization can do for the enthusiastic Manila dining scene: whether that’s “game-ifying” the experience through a custom burger-building kiosk or opening a new age food court in Bonifacio Global City (which will include a section that rotates and personalizes cuisine based on customer feedback or crowdsourcing), CloudEats is welcoming change in an industry that hasn’t quite changed in hundreds of years, at least when it comes to incorporating technology into the overall experience.
It might not be fine dining in a categorical sense, but it is fine dining: quality ingredients and freshly-made food with all the convenience one could hope for. It’s a welcome change indeed.
Photos by Ed Simon of KLIQ, Inc. (unless specified).
