Foodie Forks 2019 Food Hero Larry Tang of Hong Kong’s beloved restaurants Locofama and Sohofama has teamed up with foodpanda to give other food heroes in Hong Kong a chance to get their cooking to market. The conscious-dining pioneer revealed the new concept designed to “re-engineer Hong Kong’s food industry” at today’s Food’s Future Summit in Hong Kong.
With six new virtual restaurants available now on foodpanda, all adhering to FAMA Groups’ four pillars of “sustainable, local, organic and wellness”, this opens the door for a host of health-focused chefs to get their food out to local homes and for Hong Kongers to access better food for their bodies at reasonable prices.
By turning the traditional restaurant model on its head, the group has created the city’s first shared cloud kitchen. Dubbed a “food hero incubator”, Fama’s Kitchen, despite what the name suggests, is not simply a shared cooking space. The groundbreaking cloud kitchen provides branding, design, social media and technological development, all designed to give aspiring chefs and entrepreneurs a leg up in this incredibly difficult industry. They use a team of experts that range from Chinese medicine practitioners to Western dieticians, personal trainers and yoga instructors to co-create the menus and have even built a database that tracks the nutritional values of the ingredients used, which are guaranteed to be free of growth hormones, MSG, GMOs and pesticides. They have plans to open more cloud kitchens across Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories.
Founder of FAMA Group and Fama’s Kitchen, Larry Tang, says, “Back in 2018, we looked at the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and thought, what if we did this with our own food business? Let’s restart [and] press fast forward.
Sustainability is essential to us at FAMA Group, so we choose to include fresh, seasonal ingredients and never use MSG or chicken powder. We’re also striving to eliminate single-use plastics, choose reusable and biodegradable containers and [use] bicycles for delivery via foodpanda whenever possible.”
With a 1,700-square-foot brick-and-mortar kitchen in Sai Ying Pun equipped with six state-of-the-art cooking stations, Fama’s Kitchen provides the tools and space for future food heroes to get their own food out there without the high overheads and tight margins of the traditional restaurant archetype.
Arun Makhija, CEO of foodpanda Hong Kong, says, “We are committed to incubating and facilitating innovation in food delivery, while acknowledging that the creation of food concepts should be left to the experts. By working with the creative team of specialists at FAMA, we’re able to foster the curation of brands that directly address the needs and desires of our customer base.”
The nurturing environment is designed to generate creativity and the freedom to test recipes, fine-tune concepts, receive mentorship and join a community of like-minded creatives driven by the same passion to revolutionise Hong Kong’s dining scene.
What could the dining scene of Hong Kong look like when inspired young chefs with disruptive ideas on how to prepare nourishing ingredients have the facilities to bring them to life without the usual prohibitive risks?
This could pave the way towards a truly groundbreaking dining scene where everyone would have access to interesting, healthy and organic food – and, maybe, a whole new future of food.
For more information on the Food’s Future Summit, visit our website
