Watch How Manna Pot Establishes Themselves to be The Powerhouse of F&B Business. 

In this episode, the General Manager of Manna Pot talks about the humble beginnings of their family-run business, as well as the rapid expansion in the industry. They discuss the difficulties of having to juggle both parenthood and business, as well as the mentality to conquer the challenge during difficult times. On top of that, they also touched on ways to engage and retain staff, through both monetary and cultural aspects, and the strategies adopted to reduce costs sustained during F&B operations. 

The answers presented here have been summarized and simplified to make them easier to understand. For a complete and detailed explanation, we highly recommend that you watch the entire video podcast or listen to the audio podcast.

Q: Can you give us an introduction about yourself, and how you came into the F&B scene?

A: I am a second generation business owner – my mum started the company 22 years ago. She founded the company from home, so she started cooking from home, and she’s been running the company over the last two decades. I’ve joined the company for nine years now, and throughout the course of my career I’ve also founded several companies that are complimentary to the catering business as a whole such as Flora Artisan, Divine Artisan, Manna Weddings, as well as our restaurants. It’s a family business, my sister and brother-in-law are also involved in the business, and they are trained in The Culinary Institute of America, so they are basically helming the kitchen operations right now.

Q: How is it like growing up in an entrepreneurial family?

A: It’s fun because we always get to bounce off ideas, and we share a lot of the same passion, so we think about how we can actually bring those ideas to life. 

Q: Is there anything specific about female leadership that you find extremely empowering in your business?

A: I truly believe in women empowerment, especially in female business leaders, because I feel that women in general have so much strength. It’s not easy to have kids and run a business at the same time, especially in our industry, because it’s so time consuming. It takes a lot of hard work and resilience, but I think it’s a matter of mind over body as well, and having that strong mindset that as women, we can do it. 

Q: What is the vision of the business like?

A: My mum is very passionate about food, so she believes in providing divine, good food for the soul, and she believes that food connects people, and that every bowl of food that leaves our kitchen has to be cooked with love. It’s great that my sister and my brother-in-law are actually foodies and chefs, so they control the quality of the food. For the catering side, it’s mainly to provide a one-stop solution for our clients in terms of our event catering, and hence why we have all these other services and sister companies, which support the wedding catering, so I would say the vision is to become a one-stop service provider to our clients for catering and in terms of like food aspects of the restaurants and outlets, it would be mainly to provide really good food. 

Q: Is there a difference in the business model and strategy compared to a traditional F&B business?

A: I would say that because we’re quite diversified in our businesses, by providing these services to our clients it really gives them that one-stop holistic approach of being able to get the best quality services all in one place, so that would be one of the main differentiators that we have in terms of being in the wedding industry. 

Q: What is a recent triumph or success that you and your team have achieved?

A: We started off the year with a really great retreat together to do some planning and goal setting for the year, so I did give them the five year plan that we have, so they actually went down into the details of how they’re going to achieve this growth, and they made the necessary plans and the steps to take, which is how we opened up two outlets last year and we have plans to open three outlets this year. 

The most important thing during a retreat is to have fun. We have a great family culture, but just having an environment where everyone is comfortable and have fun with each other is important as well. We have dinners together, and we also structure it in such a way whereby we do brainstorming for two hours, and then we take a little break with team bonding activities, something fun for everyone to get together and do or enjoy good food, and then we come back and do the rest of the sessions. 

Q: What is one recent challenge that you had to overcome, and how did you overcome it?

A: In general, even though I’ve been with the company for nine years, a lot of my initiatives were more of starting new companies that were things that I was passionate about, like Divine Artisan, Flora Artisan, Manna Weddings, but the challenge of actually managing the whole organisation really only fell onto me two years ago, and that was the same time where I found out that I was pregnant with my first kid, so it was very overwhelming. I had to navigate my life, and at the same time there were a few key people that left the company as well, so it was quite overwhelming in the sense that I was thinking ‘How am I going to manage motherhood and also manage an entire company. But I am thankful when I look back on how things have panned out because right now, we’re structured and set up all the departments and processes properly in the last two years, and this is where I know we’re primed for growth and we’re ready to fly. 

Q: How do you handle staff departures?

A: People will move on with their lives, and in this current day and age we can’t expect that anyone’s going to be with the company forever, so it’s really about building an ecosystem or a very enticing workplace culture where people enjoy being a part of the culture, and also with good remuneration in order to retain and attract staff, because in F&B industry it’s not easy to hire and retain at all. One of the biggest initiative is the monthly employee spotlight, but other than that we also focus a lot on team building activities and events. We also have our annual Gala dinner, and also incentives for hitting targets, which is a very important metric for staff to feel motivated. So once they achieve the sales target, it adds to their monthly income, so there’s a money element. We had three employees of the year, we gave $800 each, so it was a little boost to motivate our staff to be excited to do well – we actually gave out cruise tickets for the best employee last year.

Q: What are some key business metrics to track?

A: Traditionally, we did not have any metrics to track because when my parents started the business, it was a very traditional way to run a business. But ever since I took over two years ago, I think that has been something that we have been reflecting on, and really putting it into place. So we’re setting KPIs for each department and it’s tied to their variable bonuses and incentives, so I would say that we’re gearing towards generic metrics for the staff to follow for their different departments in terms of what I wish to see moving towards that. 

Q: How about business ratios?

A: When we first started out and first opened outlets, it was quite new to us so we didn’t really digest these ratios, and that was a learning lesson for us. Moving forward, our assistant General Manager is great, our business development team is great, and we have a guideline for them to follow – for restaurants you should be looking at no more than 30% food cost, so anything between 28% to 31% is still acceptable. Then they will do their own analysis and report to me the figures such as forecasting the sales and food cost ratios. 

In terms of rent wise, it really depends on a lot of components like high footfall. For shopping malls, it’s definitely going to be a lot more, but for the quieter areas it depends on the concept as well, because we have The White Tiffin brand which primarily focuses on areas with high footfall, but we’re also inclined to diversify if there are opportunities. We recently opened one in a hotel, so that was more of a fusion where we had it to be buffet style, so we evolve accordingly. So for rent, it really depends on a lot of other factors. 

Labour costs are getting increasingly high, it’s quite a challenge to manage labour costs in general because it’s always inflating with policies being set that’s increasing the minimum wages for not just F&B workers, but also employment passes that are coming in, so that’s quite challenging to manage. 

Q: Are there any effective strategies adopted to reduce cost?

A: For labour costs, there’s always going to be peak periods and times where you’re not maximising the productivity of the staff, like when it’s 3pm – 5pm there’s no one that’s going to really walk in and have a full bowl of laksa, so we try to keep it to hiring more part-timers and making it more flexible so we can maximise the peak periods and make more revenue from lunchtime or dinnertime but also managing the labour cost at the same time. 

Q: What are some new digital initiatives that the company has embarked on?

A: I am an avid believer of technology and digitalisation, because even though we’re in a traditional landscape of F&B business, digitalisation is here to make our lives better and easier, so we’re always keen to adopt new technologies to better our businesses. Some of the initiatives that I’ve launched is the implementation of the ERP system, which helps us to manage from the moment our clients place an order till the order is delivered, so that’s one of them for the catering business. In terms of restaurant side, for our QSR restaurants, we implemented the use of buzzers and digital robots to serve or clear the food, as well as implementing QR code ordering which allows them to order from their tables, so we reduce on manual labour cost to take their orders and serve them the food. 

We’re also in the midst of implementing and have plans to roll out the use of AI robots, which is going to be used by our catering business and also The White Tiffin restaurant, because I think it’s quite labour intensive to have a customer service officer responding to queries on website or social media , so that would help to reduce cost. 

Q: What are the emerging trends for 2024?

A: AI is one of them because it’s such a huge thing now, so I feel that if you’re not jumping on the bandwagon you’re going to be lagging behind, so we need to be the early adopters of whatever technology. You have to be cautious, but at the same time open to embracing the latest technology advancements in general.