From classrooms to kitchens globally

In hospitality classrooms in some of Singapore’s renowned vocational training institutions, future chefs, waiters and restaurant managers are learning how to use a software platform built by a littleknown Indian company with its main office in Kochi. That company is Sapaad, and it is today deeply embedded in the global food and beverage industry.“Whenever we release a new product or feature, we train the professors first,” says Vishnu Vardhan Madabhushi, founder and chief executive of Sapaad. The students follow.It is an unlikely story. For fifteen years, quietly and without venture capital backing, Sapaad has been exporting restaurant technology software from India to more than 40 countries. Its name itself is a declaration of intent – derived from the Malayalam word “saapad”, meaning food.At a time when India’s software industry was still largely associated with outsourced services, Sapaad was trying to build original intellectual property. The company began in Dubai, bootstrapped by Vishnu and his cofounder and chief technology officer, Anup Thomas Antony, both of whom came from multinational technology backgrounds.Restaurant technology systems at the time were expensive, clunky and dominated by giant legacy players such as Oracle Micros. Smaller restaurant owners had little choice but to either spend heavily on bulky enterprise software or rely on spreadsheets and manual processes.Cloud computing had not yet meaningfully arrived in food and beverage operations. Drawing on their experience building cloud and e-commerce systems, Anup and Vishnu set out to create a platform that restaurants could deploy quickly, use easily and scale globally.The result was what the founders describe as an integrated operating layer for restaurants. Today, Sapaad handles everything from billing and kitchen operations to QR ordering, inventory, online delivery platforms and analytics. Restaurants can deploy the suite in hours rather than weeks.“With the click of a button, restaurants can deploy the system across their operations,” Anup says.The company serves about 15,000 restaurants across markets ranging from the UAE and Saudi Arabia to Kenya, Singapore, Vietnam and Latin America. Remarkably, many of those customers came on board without Sapaad having a local office or sales team in those markets. Customers discover them online, take a free trial, subscribe and start paying.Much of that ease comes from obsessive attention to user experience. The company even built a usability laboratory at its Kochi office, where designers observe how restaurant staff interact with the software and refine workflows accordingly.Kochi itself became central to the company’s evolution. About eight years ago, Sapaad shifted major operations there, attracted by efforts from local technology bodies and InfoPark to support product firms rather than outsourcing businesses.“Only now is India beginning to seriously build original software IP and products,” Anup says. Sapaad has secured patents, including one for a cloud-printing technology that allows web-based restaurant systems to route orders to multiple kitchen stations.Sophisticated tech stackUnderneath the interface sits a sophisticated technology stack – a distributed, event-driven microservices architecture. Anup likens it to the systems used by companies such as Netflix, where hundreds of loosely connected services communicate continuously.Every order, inventory movement, delivery request and customer interaction becomes part of a constantly flowing data stream. That data feeds into a large analytics engine built on top of Databricks. The latest layer of that effort is a product called Signals, which the founders describe as an AI-driven command centre for restaurants. The system continuously monitors profitability, wastage, staffing behaviour, weather conditions and dozens of operational indicators in real-time.“If a restaurant owner wants to know yesterday’s EBITDA across 40 or 50 branches, getting that information is usually very difficult,” Vishnu says. “With Signals, they can access it instantly.”The platform functions almost like a financial trading terminal for restaurant operators. A sudden rise in discounts, unusual wastage patterns or falling profitability can trigger immediate alerts.Restaurant owners can ask conversational questions rather than manually run reports. “A restaurant owner can ask which menu items cost more to make but are selling less, or which staff member is issuing too many discounts,” Anup says. The system even suggests corrective actions.