Restaurants in the UAE have been impacted heavily by Covid-19, but are now finally beginning to see a silver lining. Business is slowly accelerating again, although the pandemic has fundamentally altered the business mix for many restaurants – dine-in business is down and delivery orders are up, Tawreed experts say.

An increase in delivery orders, for the majority of restaurants, also means an increase in the amount of money “stuck” with third party food delivery aggregators. In short: Every time a customer orders and pays via an online delivery platform, the platform operator receives the money right away, but only remits a restaurant’s profit on a weekly or monthly basis, which means that, at any given time, restaurants have money “stuck” with aggregators – money that could be used to order and pay for new supplies, pay employees, or otherwise invest in the business.

Restaurants with very busy delivery operations are particularly hard it, because the amounts in question quickly reach large sums and, although, the restaurants do receive the money eventually, short-term cashflow challenges can arise, because they have to pay their suppliers and employees to be able to produce the food they’re selling via third party platforms, before receiving their sales revenue from the platform operators.

A restaurant is able to use up to four times its weekly online sales revenue to buy products and services through the Tawreed Market platform thanks to a special agreement between the restaurant, Tawreed.co, and the aggregator platforms. The Tawreed Circle of Trust (TCOT) considerably reduces cashflow challenges and ensure business continuity by allowing restaurants to use their online sales revenues to buy supplies and services on credit.

Tawreed.co’s Circle of Trust is an example of Tawreed’s “win-win” philosophy in action: TCOT helps restaurants to keep running even if they’re faced with short-term cashflow challenges and it helps third party ordering and delivery platforms to support their restaurant partners without any additional investments.