Eten Technologies Focuses on Presenting a Small-Medium Scale F&B Business Management Platform

The F&B industry in Indonesia is experiencing tremendous growth, driven by a combination of factors such as a rapidly growing middle class, changing consumer preferences and a vibrant culinary culture.

One platform that wants to provide solutions to the F&B business in Indonesia is Eten Technologies. This startup was founded with the aim of overcoming the problems experienced by F&B entrepreneurs, especially MSMEs. This digital platform seeks to revolutionize the way F&B businesses operate, connecting consumers, suppliers and entrepreneurs in a seamless ecosystem seamless pattern.

To DailySocial.id, Eten Technologies Co-founder & CEO Debbie Winardi revealed the reasons for launching the startup with Co-founder Fakhri Guniar.

Expand awareness about inventory management

It is currently recorded that around 80% of F&B businesses fail in less than 5 years due to profitability problems. One of the main causes is a lack of efficiency and knowledge about inventory management. Many people see the profits of an F&B business as very large, because they assume that if they sell fried rice, they only need to buy rice, chicken and kitchen spices.

According to Eten Technologies' monitoring, there are still many other components that must be considered. For example, their capital is IDR 10.000 and they sell it for IDR 20.000, then they will make a profit of IDR 10.000 or 50%. What is often forgotten are other costs such as gas, electricity, labor, marketing, online delivery service costs and others.

"The average net profit of F&B businesses is actually only 5% -15%. With a lack of efficiency, this net profit can decrease so that F&B businesses experience losses. There are several F&B businesses that experience even more losses even though their sales increase," said Debbie.

Seeing these facts, Eten Technologies believes that inventory management efficiency is the key to profitability and aims to provide a solution Supply Chain Management for small and medium scale F&B businesses. The company claims to be able to handle 60% of the Profit and Loss (P&L) of the F&B business and aims to increase profits by 2-3x.

"We help F&B businesses to monitor the status, movement and use of hundreds of raw material inventories owned by F&B businesses so they can identify areas that are less efficient," said Debbie.

He added that currently most F&B businesses only use spreadsheet, notebook paper, and apps chat to manage their inventory. As a result, it is difficult for them to know the inventory status rreal time and also their inventory needs.

Another problem that often occurs is that staff often forget to order raw materials, which results in problems Out of stock. As a result, they cannot sell menus that use these ingredients.

By utilizing Eten technology, they will know which ingredients are running low and get recommendations for the quantity they should order automatically without having to calculate manually. Eten can also help to monitor the movement and use of raw materials.

For example, for F&B businesses that have several o, Eten will help them to monitor whether raw materials have been sent from the center to o and inventory status will be updated automatically.

"F&B business people can also find out the value of the inventory they have easily so they can carry out analysis to optimize High Pressure Processing," said Debbie.

Focus on getting product-market fit

In particular, Eten Technologies has a product philosophy that is simple and specific. It's simple because Eten was created with mobile workers in mind so anyone should be able to use the platform easily. Specific because the F&B industry has different needs from other finished goods industries, so the solution must also be specific.

"For example, if we sell 1 bottle of shampoo, the stock in the warehouse will decrease by 1 bottle. However, in F&B, selling 1 portion of fried chicken does not always mean that only 1 portion of raw chicken is reduced in the kitchen. If the chicken is burnt, then sell 1 portion of chicken "Gprek is the same as reducing 2 servings of raw chicken in the kitchen. Therefore, general platforms cannot always answer problems in F&B," said Debbie.

In a short period of time, Eten Technologies has succeeded in obtaining Letters of Intent from more than 40 brand with over 500 locations. Currently, Eten Technologies has also been supported by two accelerator programs, namely Antler and Iterative, and has received funding support pre seed in late 2022 and early 2023.

"We have completed the Minimum Usable Product and currently we are focusing on getting it Product-Market Fit while earning more early adopters," said Debbie.

Players who offer solutions for the F&B industry today, mostly still focus on front-end or order management, but Eten Technologies will focus on Back-end or supply chain leaders for now. The Eten Technologies platform can now be accessed by registered users via situs. Eten can be used throughout Indonesia and will soon be available on the Google Play Store.

The F&B industry contributes more than a third of Indonesia's non-oil and gas GDP and is predicted to continue to grow in the coming years. Regarding the F&B tech landscape itself, Indonesia is still at an early stage because most F&B businesses still carry out operations manually.

Platforms that offer similar services include Malaysian SaaS startups Food Market Hub (FMH) platform provider that simplifies and automates operations Back-end for the food and beverage (F&B) business. Other platforms viz Essence of Global Solutions (ESB) namely the provider of business operations end-to-end at the forefront of the F&B industry.