As restaurant operators battle rising food costs, labour shortages and increasingly thin margins, attention is shifting from flashy front-of-house experiences to a less visible battleground: the kitchen. Dubai-born Supy is betting that better control over inventory, procurement and wastage can unlock significant savings for restaurant groups, and the strategy is gaining traction well beyond the Gulf.
Now operating in over 40 countries across the Middle East, the UK and Asia-Pacific, the company works with major hospitality groups including Rikas Hospitality Group, Addmind Hospitality and Sketch, using AI to help operators track food costs in real time and reduce inefficiencies.
In this interview, Dani El Zein, co-founder and CEO of Supy , explains why the future of restaurant profitability will be decided behind the kitchen door, and how AI is turning operational data into real-time decisions.
Tell us about Supy.
Supy is the operating system for multi-location restaurant groups. We give operators complete visibility into their back of house, what they’re spending, what they’re wasting, and where their margins are going, with AI built into the core from day one.
Most restaurant groups running 10, 20, 50 locations are still managing purchasing and inventory on spreadsheets, ERP systems, or systems built 15 years ago, and the margin pressure that creates is real and massive. Supy fixes that.
We connect your purchases, kitchen, sales, recipes, wastage, stock, and all your data into one intelligent layer that doesn’t just show you what happened but tells you what to do about it. We’re live across 42 countries with strong footholds in the Middle East, the UK, and Asia Pacific, and the product travels because the problem is universal.
Margin pressure and supply chain complexity don’t care what city you’re in.
Supy is a UAE-born business that has expanded regionally, but also internationally in the UK, Australia and Hong Kong. What was the secret to successfully exporting the platform? And how do the markets differ?
The secret starts with where we were born. Dubai is not a typical SaaS market. When we launched, we were not competing with other inventory platforms or back-of-house tools. We were competing with Oracle, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics. Full ERPs.
That forced us to build something far more modular and configurable than we ever would have if we had started in London or New York. We had to match the flexibility of an enterprise system while staying laser focused on restaurants.
That decision, made out of pure necessity in our earliest days, turned out to be our biggest international advantage. When we expanded into the UK, Australia, and Hong Kong, every market had different workflows, different supplier dynamics, different operational structures, and Supy could bend to fit all of them.
Beyond that, every market tests you differently. The UK is our most competitive arena, operators are sophisticated, they know the category, they have seen the alternatives, and they will stress test every corner of your product before they sign.
Australia is about ROI clarity; minimum wage pressure is real, and operators need to know the system pays for itself fast. Hong Kong is everything at once, fast-moving, high-density, globally minded operators who want enterprise capability at startup speed.
You just have to commit, hire people already embedded in each market, and back them properly.
Dani, you have run a restaurant yourself. Has that helped you understand what restaurants really need, rather than just being another tech solution in search of a market?
Absolutely, and I think it shows in the product in ways that are hard to fake. When you have stood in a kitchen, when you have dealt with a delivery at the back door at 7am, when you have tried to reconcile what was ordered versus what actually arrived while your prep team is waiting, you think about software completely differently.
You stop designing for the demo and start designing for the moment. Every workflow in Supy, every click, every screen, is built around how an operator actually thinks and moves, not how a product manager imagined they might. That is something our customers notice very quickly. They open the platform, and it just makes sense. It reflects the reality of their operation rather than forcing their operation to adapt to ours.
Most restaurant tech is built by people who understand technology. Supy is built by people who understand restaurants. That is a fundamentally different starting point, and it changes everything about what you build and how you build it
You mentioned that “back of house” operations – in the kitchen – are key to improving restaurant groups’ performance. Why is that?
Because the back of house is where the money is actually made or lost. Everyone obsesses over the front of house, the experience, the service, the ambiance. But your profitability is determined by what happens behind the kitchen door.
Food cost is typically 20-35 per cent of revenue, and most operators are managing it blind. They do not know their actual food cost in real time, they do not know if their recipes are being followed, they do not know which locations are over ordering. They find out at the end of the month when the numbers come in and by then the money is already gone.
Supy brings that visibility into the present. Recipe costs down to the ingredient level, actual versus theoretical consumption, trends across locations so you can act before a problem becomes a pattern. Front of house drives revenue. Back of house determines whether any of that revenue actually becomes profit
What are Supy’s competitive differentiators?
A few things separate us, and they compound on each other. First is depth. Supy is not a lightweight inventory tool. It is a system built to handle the complexity of serious multi-location operations, the kind of configurability and workflow depth that you would historically only get from an ERP.
Second is integrations. We connect with the widest range of POS systems, accounting platforms, and supplier networks in the market, which means Supy sits at the center of your entire operation rather than being another siloed tool.
Third is our technology infrastructure. We built on a world-class tech stack from day one, which means the platform is fast, reliable, and scales cleanly whether you are running five locations or 500.
Fourth is AI, and I do not mean AI as a feature we bolted on. The intelligence layer is core to how Supy works, it is what turns your operational data into decisions rather than just reports. And finally, support. This is one we hear constantly from customers who have come from other platforms. When something happens, a real person who understands your operation picks up.
At the scale our customers operate, downtime or confusion is not a minor inconvenience, it is a business problem, and we treat it that way.
How fundamental is AI to Supy’s business model? And what are the advantages of that AI for your restaurant group clients?
We started as a system of record. Now we are a system of intelligence and that is a fundamentally different thing. The intelligence layer sits across your entire operation and turns data into decisions.
Anomaly detection catches a food cost spike at one of your outlets before it becomes a trend. AI invoice processing scans every supplier invoice, matches it, and flags any pricing discrepancy before approval. Suppliers behave differently when they know every line is being checked. AI sales forecasting and predictive ordering means your purchasing is no longer based on gut feelings, it is based on a model that understands your demand patterns across every location.
The direction we are heading is agentic AI, food cost agents that do not just flag problems but act on them. The shift is from having a system to having a co-pilot.
You have clients such as Corrigan Collection and Sketch in the UK for example. Who else do you work with, and how have you persuaded such strong brands to work with you?
Our client base spans some of the most respected operators in the world. In the Middle East, groups like Rikas Hospitality (part of Ennismore), which is behind Gigi Beach Club, Mimi Kakushi, and Maison Revka. There’s also Addmind Hospitality, Nammos, Ce La Vi, The Address Coffee and Home Bakery.
In Australia, we work with brands like Zeus Street Greek and Mulberry Group, serious multi-location operators who represent exactly the kind of growth-focused restaurant business Supy is built for. In Asia Pacific more broadly, groups like Dough Bros who operate across Hong Kong, China, and Thailand. In the UK, alongside Corrigan Collection and Sketch, we are growing quickly with operators like Poke Shack, You Me Sushi, and Burger and Sauce.
As for how we earn them, there is no shortcut. Hospitality is a word of mouth industry. You deliver for one operator, they tell another. When we entered the UK, strong partners like Lightspeed and Williams Stanley & Co helped open doors. But operators of that calibre sign because they have done their due diligence, and they believe the product will deliver.
The only thing that really matters is making sure it does.
What keeps restaurant owners awake at night? And how does Supy help them?
Not knowing if they are making or losing money. That is genuinely the answer.
You can have a full restaurant every night and still be losing money because your food cost is out of control, your recipes are not being followed, your suppliers are overcharging you on deliveries, and nobody caught it. The numbers only show up at the end of the month and by then the damage is done. What keeps operators up at night is that feeling of flying blind. Revenue looks fine, the restaurant feels busy, but the margin is quietly disappearing, and they do not know where. Supy fixes that.
We give operators a real-time view of exactly where their money is going, down to the ingredient, down to the location, down to the supplier. So instead of finding out on the 30th that you had a bad month, you know on Tuesday that something is wrong, and you fix it on Wednesday.
You claim to reduce restaurant costs by 20 per cent. Where are these savings made?
Most operators we speak to don’t actually know their real food cost. They have a theoretical one sitting in a recipe card and an actual one that tells a very different story at the end of the month. That gap is where the 20 per cent operates.
Once you have visibility, the levers become obvious. Wastage that was never being recorded. Portion variance that nobody was catching – one of our clients was over-portioning a single ingredient by just a few grams across hundreds of servings a day, which added up to tens of thousands of dollars a year. Nobody had caught it because nobody had the data to catch it. Then there’s ordering decisions made on gut feel rather than actual consumption data, and supplier invoices that don’t match what was actually received.
These aren’t exotic problems. They’re happening in almost every kitchen we walk into. The savings don’t come from one big fix – they come from closing a hundred small gaps that individually look manageable but collectively are destroying the margin.
For any company buying and integrating a new technology, using it has to be easy. How long does Supy take to install and train staff on?
This is where the industry has been burned before. Legacy software that takes six months to implement and never fully works. We’ve built our entire implementation model around speed and simplicity. Most clients go live within weeks, not months.
The product itself is designed so that a kitchen porter or store manager can use it on day one – it runs on a mobile app, it’s intuitive, and we deliberately didn’t build it for finance teams sitting behind a desktop (although it works great for them too). And our implementation team is mostly former cost controllers, not software consultants. They’ve worked in kitchens, they understand the operation, and they set clients up in a way that maps to how their team actually.
And of course, we have some AI hacks that help speed things up, getting recipe and supplier data into the system much faster than a human alone could.
What does 2026 hold for Supy?
We’ve launched AI Sales Forecasting and our Command Centre, which brings all of our AI capabilities together in one place, real-time anomaly detection, predictive ordering, and the beginnings of agentic AI that does not just flag problems but acts on them.
Alongside that, we are launching our co-pilot, an AI layer that sits across your entire operation and starts making decisions on your behalf, adjusting orders, flagging variances, closing the loop without someone having to initiate it.
We are also expanding into new product verticals, production planning is a big one, giving operators the ability to plan and manage what gets produced in their kitchens based on forecasted demand rather than guesswork.
On the market side we are doubling down in the UK, Australia, and Southeast Asia where we are seeing the strongest traction, and we are entering Europe with Germany being our first move, before entering the US before the end of year.
The bigger picture is that back of house generates the richest operational data in the entire restaurant industry and it has been sitting there largely untapped. 2026 is the year we unlock it.
