A new generation of operating platforms — led by companies like Foodics — is quietly enabling retail media-style capability inside F&B.
Walk into almost any ambitious restaurant in Dubai or Riyadh today and you are walking into something that did not quite exist five years ago: a commerce engine wrapped in a dining room. The menu is optimised by algorithm. The kiosk that takes your order is harvesting preference data. The loyalty app on your phone is feeding a predictive model that already knows, with some confidence, what you will order next Tuesday.
Food and beverage, the oldest industry in human commerce, is being remade as a performance marketing ecosystem — and the transformation is moving faster in the Gulf than almost anywhere else on earth.
The GCC foodservice market, valued at roughly $62 billion in 2025, is projected to reach $122 billion by 2031, growing at a compound annual rate of over 12 percent, according to Mordor Intelligence. Inside that enormous expansion, a quieter structural shift is underway.
Restaurants are ceasing to be purely transactional spaces and are becoming what technology analysts now describe as “media and commerce hybrids” — businesses that simultaneously produce content, own audience channels, accumulate first-party data, and deploy it to drive measurable commercial outcomes.
Against that backdrop, technology platforms are gaining ground as operators look for tighter control over revenue and costs.
From transactions to measurable growth
Companies such as Foodics are expanding beyond point-of-sale systems into a broader role that blends payments, ordering and analytics.
Foodics announced this month its “Forward Together” initiative — a package of financial relief and access to technology designed to help F&B operators in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait navigate a period of acute cost pressure. Framed as a relief programme, the initiative is also a window into how technology platforms are quietly transforming the structural capabilities of their operator base.
The initiative extends free access for existing clients to Foodics Online and self-ordering kiosks — direct-to-consumer digital channels that, crucially, generate data owned by the restaurant rather than by a third-party aggregator. Free hardware accompanies the offer. But perhaps the most strategically significant element is free access to Foodics AI, the platform’s predictive analytics tool, enabling operators to use data from their own operations to make forward-looking decisions about staffing, menu design, and promotional timing. Flexible payment terms and discounted packages for new clients round out the offering.
“The F&B industry employs over a million in our region and is considered one of the private sector drivers across GCC and North African markets. This is the backbone of these communities,” said Ahmad AlZaini, Co-founder and CEO, Foodics.
The language is philanthropic. The architecture is something more strategic. By embedding AI-powered analytics into restaurants that previously made decisions by instinct and spreadsheet, Foodics is effectively upgrading the data sophistication of an entire industry segment — and in doing so, building the kind of ecosystem in which performance marketing becomes possible at scale for operators of all sizes, not just large chains.
Founded in Saudi Arabia, Foodics now serves more than 30,000 restaurants with a cloud-based platform that integrates in-store and online operations. Increasingly, the company is pitching its tools as a way to help restaurants track performance — from customer acquisition to repeat visits — using first-party data.
THE DATA IMPERATIVE
The pressure to build owned data infrastructure has become existential. Guest data held on DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Instagram does not belong to the restaurant operator; that relationship is platform-owned.
Commission hikes, algorithm changes, and rising paid acquisition costs on third-party aggregators have pushed even small operators to reckon with a fundamental question: who actually owns my customer?
First-party data — names, emails, order history, visit frequency, preferences — collected directly through a restaurant’s own channels is permanent and immune to platform policy or algorithm changes. The distinction, which once seemed academic, has become urgently practical.
According to Qu’s 2025 State of Digital Report, customer data platform investments among enterprise restaurant brands were up 11 percent year on year in 2025, outpacing loyalty programme investment for the first time — with 40 percent of brands identifying first-party digital ordering as the top revenue growth channel, precisely because owning the guest relationship creates upsell opportunities that third-party platforms cannot replicate.
The Starbucks model has become the reference case for operators worldwide. Starbucks Rewards members — 34.2 million active in the U.S. as of Q4 2025, according to the company’s earnings release — now account for more than half of U.S. revenue, with roughly one quarter of transactions flowing through its mobile app. The company’s Deep Brew AI platform underpins the personalisation engine that makes those relationships commercially productive.
Domino’s tells a parallel story grounded in even sharper numbers. According to SEC filings, the pizza chain generated more than 85 percent of its U.S. retail sales in 2024 through digital channels — a figure its most recent earnings release confirms has held above 85 percent through 2025. These are no longer outliers to admire from a distance. They are the template being aggressively studied by operators from Riyadh to Cairo.
Cost pressure
The GCC faces its own version of these pressures. In February 2026, Kuwait implemented delivery platform regulations capping commission rates at 15 percent — a measure protecting smaller operators but signalling the regulatory friction building across a sector that has grown dependent on aggregator infrastructure, according to Mordor Intelligence’s GCC Foodservice Market report. Cloud kitchen growth has surged in parallel: the GCC cloud kitchen market, valued at $2.22 billion in 2025, is projected to reach $6.74 billion by 2034, according to IMARC Group.
Cost pressure is, paradoxically, accelerating the very capabilities that will define the next era of restaurant competition. Investment in software and technology among F&B professionals rose from 83 percent in 2024 to 98 percent in 2025, according to Expert Market’s industry survey. Operators are widening revenue models: around 33 percent are expanding off-premise dining, approximately 27 percent are adding retail and packaged goods including branded items, and roughly 21 percent are introducing experiential offerings such as ticketed tasting events and chef-led classes.
Each of these moves generates a new data stream. Each data stream, properly captured and integrated, is an asset — the kind of asset that retail media networks have spent years monetising, and that restaurants are only beginning to recognise they hold.
