A young lady helped launch a new food service store in the Philippines called Restaurant Depot—a one-stop shop for food, equipment and supplies.
Margaret Tieng, the marketing manager of Restaurant Depot, deals with the daily challenges of keeping up with the demands of clients, especially start-up businesses who are still learning the ropes of running a food service business.
“Our target market is anybody involved in home baking, running a canteen or eatery, owns a single restaurant, or has a catering business. Basically these are people who are starting out a business. They want more flexibility in terms of what they require with the budget they have. This is the kind of target market we want to provide convenience and cost savings,” Tieng says.
She says Restaurant Depot gives consumers and clients the advantage of securing their needs under one big roof, instead of them doing the rounds to procure items from different suppliers.
Restaurant Depot is a membership-only warehouse club for people involved in the food service industry—canteens, food stalls, restaurants, caterers, home bakers and chefs.
The membership gives clients access to a large selection of ingredients, food supplies and kitchenware in a convenient shopping format, where buying in bulk translates into big savings.
Restaurant Depot is a unit of Le Professional Food Service Concepts Inc., one of the companies under the Solar Group, owned and managed by the Tieng family.
The store was built from the ground up, two years after the company spotted and eventually bought a 2,0000-square-meter property along Harrison Ave. corner Edsa. The retail space spans 1,200 square meters of eclectic assortment of food and wares.
Tieng got her degree from Ateneo de Manila University. The eldest of two children, Tieng, despite being soft-spoken and mild-mannered, possesses a sharp business acumen, having worked previously in a retail consumer firm, another family-owned business.
She has been very hands-on from the the conceptualization phase, churning out ideas and creatives that will make the depot concept a surefire endeavor.
“In the two years before the Depot started ,we were curating all these SKUs [stock keeping units], thousands of them, in fact, with a hundred suppliers. We were checking prices, counter-checking them with other suppliers, checking the market, checking with chefs, and restaurants and caterers, to see what are their preferred brands,” she says.
Tieng says the exercise was both exhilarating and tiring.
A survey from target clients also helped the owners in creating the best selection for edibles and non-edibles.
Restaurant Depot, upon opening a few weeks ago, came up with several categories that offers a wide range of choices for buyers.
At the fresh and frozen counter are seafood, meat, chicken and pork products that went through rigorous quality control standards by trusted suppliers and priced competitively while the processed section section carries food fares from frozen dimsum products to processed meat and shabu-shabu ingredients.
Restaurant Depot is also a baker’s haven with specialized sections for fudges, syrups, flavorings, sprinkles, nuts and chocolates.
It also offers great selection of cooking oil, olive oils and truffle oil; dry goods which are the staple of full service meal from flour, rice, salt to sugar products in bulk sizes; dairy products like big portions of mozzarella, cream cheese and other dairy products.
The dry goods section has various sizes of canned mushrooms, corn, olives, tuna, meat products, pasta and noodles.
Restaurant Depot has an extensive array of spices, with shelves full of choice seasonings and at least 50 popular and rare spices in large packs.
From ready to drink juices, beverage syrups, purees, to economical juice powder packs, Restaurant Depot provides numerous choices of beverage blends for food service needs. The store also has a wide section of alcoholic products—from imported wines, beers and liquor.
The store offers all sorts of condiments from ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, soy sauce, fish sauce and vinegar, as it also brings world food cuisine to table tops with everything from Thai to Malaysian to Japanese condiments.
A huge assortment of non-edibles like packaging sets include cupcake liners, pastry and cake boxes; as well as various plastic food storage sizes for take-out needs and disposable party products in bulk.
The Depot also carries cleaning aids from scrubs to sponges and cleaning liquids.
Restaurant Depot has a network of local suppliers from international sources. For 2017, the Depot will start directly importing hard to find goods and products, per request of clients.
“Our objective is to pass on savings for people who are just starting a business. Ours is a depot, so our price everyday is cheaper than most shops. As much as we give premium to better price points, we also want them to save time. With us, clients are always doubly compensated,” Tieng says.