A structurally distinct narrative has emerged within the highly competitive Middle East and North Africa (MENA) beverage corridor. Dodo Brands—the international franchising powerhouse that scaled Dodo Pizza to more than 1,500 locations across 26 countries—systematically deployed its proprietary IT stack to disrupt the corporate coffee ecosystem through its digital-first concept, Drinkit.
Led by Katerina Borodich, Chief Executive Officer of Drinkit UAE, the brand executed a rapid expansion across Dubai’s premium business districts, scaling from a blank canvas to a pipeline of 20 active locations while maintaining a year-over-year like-for-like growth rate between 30% and 60%. In a conversation with Retail World, Borodich dismantled the traditional tech-retail dichotomy, outlining a sophisticated operational blueprint in which software does not replace human interaction but directly secures unit economics, rapid franchise replication, and long-term asset valuation.
The Operational Hypothesis
In mass-market commerce, operators typically manage a physical store that also deploys an app. Drinkit flipped that paradigm entirely.
“Inside the company, we often say that we’re not just a coffee shop—we’re an app with a coffee shop,” Borodich stated. “That said, I wouldn’t say technology comes first. In any business, the customer comes first, and technology is simply an enabler. You can build a brilliant app and have a magnificent point of sale (POS) system, but if your barista doesn’t show up to open the store and turn on the coffee machine, you have nothing.”
This philosophy manifested in a transaction matrix in which approximately 95% to 97% of all customer orders were routed either entirely through the proprietary mobile application or through localized in-store digital kiosks. By shifting transactional friction away from the counter, Drinkit achieved a structural advantage that directly improved front-of-house labor efficiency and customer retention.
“We’ve removed the transactional conversations, where customers have to repeat complicated orders every day, and delegated those tasks to technology,” Borodich explained. “As a result, the interactions between our baristas and customers have become more genuine. They can talk about other things, build relationships, and create a more meaningful experience. That’s the role of technology for us—not replacing people, but enabling better human connections.”
The Ground-Up Mandate
Before taking the helm of Drinkit’s Middle Eastern expansion, she served as Chief Operating Officer at Dodo Pizza UK, where she engineered a financial turnaround that shifted store-level EBITDA from-40% to +6.44 % in 14 months, while validating complex product hypotheses on specialized Roman-style dough formulations.
Her operational tenure established a core conviction that retail standards look immaculate on a corporate slide deck but frequently collapse during morning peak rush hours if the leadership team has never managed the floor.
“I didn’t even know the difference between a flat white and a cappuccino at the time—and I failed my first attempt to pass barista certification in Drinkit,” Borodich revealed. “I had to improve and come back again. That experience reinforced something important: quality standards matter, and everyone in the company is expected to meet them. When you’ve done the job yourself, the chances of making poor decisions decrease dramatically. You understand what’s possible, what’s difficult, and where the real challenges lie.”
For instance, the physical strain of lifting heavy components from the floor during high-volume periods led to the rapid introduction of mobile, wheeled carts across the fleet. This minor operational tweak reduced staff fatigue and accelerated beverage preparation. This ground-up empathy is even extended to prospective franchise partners, who are required to work operational store shifts as part of the corporate vetting process to evaluate their cultural alignment and respect for the front-line workforce.
The Unit Economics Matrix
For the core Dubai market, the business is safely tracking a localized revenue target of approximately $4.5 million for 2026.
When evaluating the financial health of the retail estate, Borodich rejects standard industry vanity metrics, prioritizing a strict Return on Investment (ROI) matrix over standalone store-level margins.
“I intentionally don’t put EBITDA at the top of the list because a store may have a healthy EBITDA margin but still take too long to recover the investment,” Borodich stated. “On the other hand, a store with a lower margin but a much faster payback period can be a better business. ROI captures everything: capital expenditure, store-level profitability, operational efficiency, and unit economics. That’s why it’s our primary financial benchmark. Our target is to keep the payback period below four years, and today, most of our stores are around three years. Some of our newer stores are performing even better and are on track to achieve payback in less than two years.”
The Real Estate and Delivery Continuum
To maintain this compressed payback velocity, Drinkit developed a highly flexible, low-capex real estate deployment strategy. Rather than restricting its growth exclusively to hyper-premium, exorbitantly high-street locations, the brand optimized its format to thrive in medium-traffic zones, urban business districts, and enclosed corporate headquarters—such as its specialized, compact installation inside the Emirates Islamic Bank headquarters.
By pricing premium specialty coffee at a highly disruptive, affordable baseline of approximately 15 UAE dirhams ($3.85), the brand successfully transformed its locations into high-frequency, non-discretionary daily rituals for white-collar workforces. This strong value proposition is fortified by a robust delivery channel that accounts for 15% of the total UAE business.
If a specific beverage formulation degrades or changes in consistency during the standard transit window, it is instantly removed from the delivery menu. This absolute devotion to consistency resulted in a 40% repeat-order retention rate across its digital delivery channels, achieved entirely without relying on aggressive margin-eroding promotions or discounts.
The Franchise Scale Engine
With only six corporate-owned flagship locations maintained in Dubai to validate local unit economics, Drinkit’s broader regional and international expansion—including a massive forward pipeline of over 400 global franchise commitments—is driven entirely through a pure franchise-owned, franchise-operated (FOFO) framework.
The ultimate value proposition delivered to these franchise partners is the group’s completely proprietary, in-house developed IT ecosystem. The back-office platform provides partners with total real-time operational visibility, serving as a single source of truth accessible from anywhere globally.
The system automatically tracks granular metrics from average ticket sizes to localized product cost margins. Crucially, customer feedback loops are tied directly to the software, enabling immediate diagnostic interventions. The brand is currently advancing toward embedding natural-language AI capabilities back-of-house, allowing franchise operators to run automated diagnostic queries to immediately pinpoint the exact operational bottleneck—whether it is a localized drop in preparation speed or a specific deviation in product quality—causing a temporary fluctuation in regional sales.
The Non-Conventional Marketing Paradigm
As customer acquisition costs (CAC) continue to skyrocket across saturated digital ad exchanges, Borodich leverages her deep marketing background to enforce a hyper-local, boots-on-the-ground customer acquisition strategy that stands in stark contrast to traditional corporate spend models.
“The reality is that marketing in Dubai is extremely expensive,” Borodich noted. “The amount of advertising, competition, and noise that consumers are exposed to every day is incredible. That’s why I built our marketing strategy around two core pillars: location visibility and local marketing.”
The core marketing mandate is to absorb the cost of getting the customer through the door exactly once. Beyond that initial physical touchpoint, the extreme convenience of the app-led pickup experience, matched with strict product quality, is left to entirely drive long-term organic retention.
Replicating the Digital-First Hospitality Architecture
The systemic expansion of Drinkit across hyper-competitive international hubs established a clear operational blueprint for modern enterprise retail and hospitality frameworks. To safeguard corporate viability and protect unit economics within highly congested consumer markets, organizational structures required a fundamental shift away from legacy management vanity metrics toward three core execution principles:
- De-Frictioning the Frontend to Accentuate the Product: Digital software installations were no longer treated merely as passive channels to harvest marketing analytics. Advanced enterprise networks utilized their proprietary technology stacks to systematically eliminate front-of-house transactional friction—specifically targeting automated checkout loops, cash handling, and manual queue management. This technical decoupling allowed frontline employees to dedicate their entire operational energy toward manufacturing precision, product quality control, and authentic customer engagement.
- Institutionalizing Executive Immersion in Field Operations: Corporate structures aggressively dismantled traditional boardroom isolation by enforcing mandatory, scheduled operational shifts for all corporate office directors, developers, and prospective franchise investors. Firsthand physical exposure to the real-world constraints of the store floor was recognized as the only reliable mechanism to engineer high-velocity kitchen workflows, construct enforceable corporate labor standards, and build functional organizational synergy between corporate strategists and frontline baristas.
- Anchoring Financial Performance in Capital Payback Velocity: Fleet development audits were intentionally transitioned away from isolated store-level EBITDA margins that dangerously ignored upfront capital expenditures. Real estate selection and brand expansion parameters were held strictly accountable to a rigorous Return on Investment (ROI) matrix. New physical footprints were authorized solely based on their algorithmic capacity to compress the absolute capital payback window below a strict four-year threshold, ensuring that geographic scale directly insulated corporate valuation rather than diluting cash reserves.
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Sources: Exclusive Corporate Interview Data from Katerina Borodich (CEO Drinkit UAE); Dodo Brands Audited Franchise Performance Registers (June 2026); UAE Store-Level Unit Economics Briefings; Historical Operational Logs from Dodo Pizza UK.
