Local sourcing is the flavour of the game

Dubai: The casual dining chain Applebee’s is reworking its sourcing strategy — from meeting 80 per cent its requirements from overseas, it now has brought it down to between 30 to 40 per cent. The intention is to drop it down to 20 per cent by year end, according to a senior official.

“Until recently it was quite a task to get the required quantities from local suppliers and conforming to the quality benchmarks we required,” said Gary Moore, regional general manager. “Even the fitouts for our locations were imported, but since the beginning of the year we have been working on creating a sustainable locally sourced network.

“So far, we have reached around the 60-70 per cent level in local sourcing with beef being the only staple still sourced from the US. This process has also been helped by us attaining critical scale in terms of network locations and frees up our franchise partners to develop the brand organically.”