Operations are anchored by a HACCP-compliant central commissary kitchen that standardises recipes, captures purchasing efficiencies, guarantees quality and supplies every format, stores, kiosks, mobile units, franchisees and the packaged range. This vertically integrated backbone is what allows a made-to-order, experiential concept to scale consistently without losing quality.
Operating backbone
- Central commissary kitchen (HACCP-compliant) producing bases, mixes and packaged products under strict food-safety standards, driving consistency and purchasing scale.
- Cold-chain logistics moving product reliably to stores, kiosks and mobile units, critical, and a genuine risk to manage given South Africa’s load-shedding and cold-chain challenges.
- Inventory management and point-of-sale analytics controlling stock, waste and margin, and giving real-time visibility of sales by product, outlet and daypart.
- A franchise training academy and CRM platform institutionalising recipes, service standards and brand experience, and managing customer relationships and loyalty across the network.
Organisation and people
The business launches with roughly 60 employees, executive management, operations, a central production-kitchen team, a retail team, marketing, finance and administration, and drivers and logistics, scaling with the rollout. The made-to-order model keeps store operations relatively simple and labour requirements manageable, which supports the kiosk and franchise formats; the central kitchen concentrates the more complex production and quality control where it can be managed and standardised.
Cold chain, load-shedding and quality
Frozen desserts live and die by the cold chain. The plan invests in cold-chain equipment and logistics from the outset, and must manage South Africa’s load-shedding risk through backup power at the central kitchen and key stores and disciplined cold-chain monitoring, a real operating cost and risk that is addressed explicitly in the findings. A significant share of premium ingredients and some equipment is imported and priced in foreign currency, so procurement discipline and currency awareness are part of protecting margin. HACCP-grade food-safety systems protect both customers and the brand.
NoteThe central kitchen is the moat and the risk
The commissary kitchen is what turns a single experiential store into a scalable, franchisable brand, consistency, purchasing power, packaged-product supply. It is also a concentration of cold-chain and load-shedding risk and a fixed cost that must be filled by volume. Building it early is the right call, but it is part of why the early years carry more overhead relative to revenue than a single store would.