Dubai has made delivery-only kitchens easy to start: a station in a shared facility, three platforms, and a brand that exists on a screen. The part nobody hands over is the arithmetic — what is left of an order after the platform, the packaging and the driver-facing discounts, and how many of those orders the kitchen can actually plate at eight in the evening.
Percentages differ by contract and by platform, so run this with your own numbers rather than ours. The structure, though, is the same in every UAE cloud kitchen we have opened or audited.
| Line | What it does to the order |
|---|---|
| Menu price on the platform | Usually marked up against dine-in. The mark-up is not margin; it is what pays for the next two lines. |
| Platform commission | Taken before payout. Read the rate in your own contract, then check it against the statement — the two disagree more often than owners expect. |
| Promotions and platform-funded discounts | Some are shared, some are entirely yours. This is the line that quietly turns a good week into a flat one. |
| Packaging | Real money per order, and the item most often left out of the recipe cost. Bags, containers, lids, sauce cups, cutlery, sticker. |
| Food cost | Only meaningful if the recipe is registered with real portions, including the platform-only items. |
| Refunds and adjustments | Deducted later, in a different statement period, which is why the month never ties on the first attempt. |
| What reaches the bank | The only number that belongs in the denominator of your food cost. |
What is left after commission, packaging, promotions and food. If you do not know it per brand and per platform, you cannot tell which brand is carrying which.
The ceiling is the pass and the packing bench, not the market. A kitchen that slips to a 40-minute prep time at peak gets ranked down by the platform and loses the orders it was hoping to grow into.
Sales on the POS, statement by platform, and deposits in the bank — matched every month. Unmatched, a wrong commission rate can run for a year without anyone noticing.
| Stage | What happens | Who does it |
|---|---|---|
| Before signing | Menu built backwards from contribution per order. Platform contracts read before the fit-out, not after. | Backhouse and the owner |
| Licence and facility | Trade licence, virtual-brand arrangements, food-safety and municipality approvals for the unit. | Your PRO and licensing consultants. Backhouse sequences and holds the deadlines. |
| Fit-out and equipment | The station, the packing bench, cold chain, and the equipment list matched to the menu you actually costed. | Facility and equipment suppliers, budget tracked weekly by Backhouse |
| POS and data | Recipes with real portions, packaging in the cost, price master, platform items mapped to POS items so the reports reconcile from day one. | Backhouse |
| Platform onboarding | Menus, photography, prep times, opening hours, and the promotion plan for the first eight weeks. | Owner with Backhouse |
| Week one onward | Weekly one-page P&L per brand, first payout reconciliation, prep-time and rating watch. | Backhouse |
Food safety, municipality applications and licensing are the work of specialist consultants and your PRO. We design the order, hold the dates and keep the kitchen, the menu and the POS consistent with what the licence allows.
One kitchen running four brands looks like four revenue lines and one rent. It is also four recipe sets, four price masters, four packaging inventories and, at month end, sixteen statement-to-POS reconciliations. Operators who add brands faster than they add back-office discipline end up unable to say which brand earns. Add a brand when the current ones are reconciled, plated inside the promised prep time, and profitable on their own line.
It is cheaper to open and not necessarily cheaper to run. You save the dining room, the front-of-house team and much of the fit-out. You give up walk-in customers, which means close to all of your revenue arrives through aggregator platforms that keep a commission and own the customer relationship. The rent you saved reappears as commission and marketing spend.
As many as the kitchen can plate at peak without a second station and without confusing the packing bench — usually far fewer than the operator hopes. Every added brand multiplies recipes, price masters, packaging SKUs and reconciliation lines. Two well-run brands beat five that share unregistered recipes.
Three things, in this order: the net contribution per order after commission and packaging; the number of orders per hour the kitchen can hold at peak without extending delivery time; and whether anyone reconciles what the platforms paid against what the POS sold. The third is where most single-site operators lose money quietly.
Brand and trade-name arrangements for virtual brands are a licensing question and depend on your free zone or mainland authority — that work belongs with your PRO and licensing consultant, not with us. What we do is design the sequence, hold the deadlines and make sure the kitchen, menu and POS structure match whatever the licence allows.
Yes. Monthly Ops was built for exactly this shape: multiple platforms, multiple brands out of one kitchen, and payouts that need reconciling per brand and per platform every month, with a weekly one-page P&L per brand.
Send one month of platform statements and your POS summary. In 30 minutes we will tell you what a typical order really leaves you, per brand and per platform.
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