Running a cloud kitchen in Dubai: monthly costs and the orders you need to break even
Licence guides stop at the setup fees. This one is about the monthly bill, and how many orders a day it takes to cover it.
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Most guides to opening a cloud kitchen in Dubai cover licences and setup. That is the easy part: a known list of fees, paid once. The hard part is the monthly bill, and whether the kitchen sells enough each day to cover it. That is what this guide is about.
Add up your fixed monthly costs, work out what you keep from each order after the app, discounts, food and packaging, and divide one by the other. In our worked example a kitchen with AED 35,000 of monthly fixed costs needs about 73 orders a day to break even. Your numbers will differ, but the method does not.
Setup costs, briefly
You will need a trade licence (mainland through the Department of Economy and Tourism, or a free zone), a food establishment licence from Dubai Municipality and food safety approvals, plus fit-out and equipment. Company-setup firms publish licence estimates; Shuraa Business Setup, for example, puts mainland cloud kitchen licensing at roughly AED 16,000 to 25,000. Get current quotes, because fees and requirements change.
The monthly bill
An example for a single cloud kitchen. Every number here is illustrative: replace it with your own quotes.
| Fixed monthly cost | Example AED |
|---|---|
| Kitchen rent (shared kitchen unit or own space) | 12,000 |
| Staff (four people, salaries, visas and housing allowance spread monthly) | 16,000 |
| Utilities, gas and internet | 3,000 |
| Licence renewals, insurance and software, spread monthly | 2,500 |
| Cleaning, pest control and maintenance | 1,500 |
| Total fixed | 35,000 |
What you keep per order
| Per order | AED |
|---|---|
| Average menu price | 55.00 |
| Discount you fund | −5.00 |
| Net sales | 50.00 |
| Commission at 25% | −12.50 |
| App marketing | −2.00 |
| Adjustments | −0.50 |
| Net payout | 35.00 |
| Food cost (30% of menu price) and packaging | −19.00 |
| What you keep (CM3) | 16.00 |
The break-even number
AED 35,000 of fixed costs, divided by AED 16 kept per order, is 2,188 orders a month. Over 30 days, that is about 73 orders a day just to cover costs, before the owner earns anything.
We track this as orders per store per day (OSD). It is the single most useful number for a cloud kitchen, because it connects the kitchen's costs to what the apps actually deliver. If you run several brands from one kitchen, add their orders together.
Raising what you keep per order from AED 16 to AED 20 cuts break-even from 73 to 58 orders a day. That usually comes from fewer discounts, better combos and tighter food cost, not from more ad spend.
Illustrative kitchen from the tables above. Every extra dirham kept per order pulls break-even closer.
Ways to reach it sooner
- Run more than one brand from the same kitchen, in different categories. See launching a second delivery brand.
- Raise the average order with combos instead of discounts. See combo pricing.
- Pick the location for delivery density, not cheap rent. A cheaper kitchen far from customers means longer deliveries and lower ratings.
- Know which apps make money. See what you keep from AED 100.
Idle hours are the cheapest place to find orders. A Business Bay burger kitchen with quiet afternoons added two brands built on its existing pantry and moved from a −6% to a +12% net margin in three months, with fixed costs flat.
The first 90 days
New kitchens rarely hit break-even in month one. Plan cash for at least three months of the gap, and use that time to get ratings above 4.3, fix menus and find which brand and app combinations work.
Asif leads sales and client partnerships across every Gromad service, and is usually the first person a restaurant owner speaks to.
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