Saudi Arabia-based food and beverages (F&B) retail and restaurant management platform Foodics, has expanded to Egypt. 

The expansion comes after the cloud-based company closed its pre-Series B investment round in 2019, raising $4 million. 

Founded in 2014 by Ahmad Al-Zaini and Mosab Al-Othmani, Foodics offers a point of sale (POS) solution and management platform which helps restaurants and cloud kitchens owners effectively manage their business. 

The company has so far serviced over 5000 customers and processed over a billion orders through its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, totaling over $2 billion gross merchandise volume (GMV) transactions in 2019 and catering to more than 10,000 F&B outlets.

“With an F&B Market estimated to be worth around $15 billion and growing at a 15-20 per cent rate over the next five years, Foodics' expansion into Egypt was always an integral part of our business plan,” said Ahmad Al-Zaini co-founder and CEO of Foodics. “Our objective is to continue to accelerate the F&B and retail end-to-end digitisation across the region and beyond.”

The Egyptian Foodics team will first focus on building its SaaS platform and hardware for restaurants, later followed by the launch of its Foodics NOW products. Besides Egypt, the company operates in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. 

The company has already signed up 15 new businesses in Egypt and is expecting to sign on 50 businesses before the end of the year. 

“We see a lot of development going on in Egypt, and this goes in tandem with a growing momentum in the F&B sector, AlZainin told Wamda. “Egypt is the second largest F&B market in the region after Saudi Arabia. There is so much potential in there.”

What lies ahead?

The company is also expanding to Kuwait, according to AlZaini, it is going to be either by the end of fourth quarter of 2020 or the first quarter of the next year. It also plans to expand to other markets in the Middle East as well as in South Asia.

Another product that the company is planning to launch is Foodics Capital, which is a fund programme that offers micro loans. 

“We secure more than $100 hundred million fund in order to deploy micro loans to our merchants,” AlZaini told Wamda. We are launching it in Saudi Arabia this year, and Egypt and our other operation markets will follow suit next year.”