At the height of success, there’s nowhere else to go but up. This is why restaurateurs who have built a strong brand and loyal following often find themselves at a pivotal crossroads: to stay comfortably where they are or to take the leap and scale their business.
While it is every business owner’s dream to watch their brand grow beyond a single kitchen, expansion is no easy feat.
Growth can mean opening new branches, expanding to different cities and regions, launching new product lines, or even opening themselves to franchising. But more than that, scaling an F&B business is about building systems, maintaining consistency, and evolving strategically—without compromising quality.
“Scaling means you are no longer able to be in every kitchen, dining room, and meeting room 100 percent of the time. It’s just impossible. There aren’t enough hours in the day,” explains Abba Napa, Manam’s founder and director for creative development
Who better to talk about this than the team behind The Moment Group? With a strong portfolio of restaurants under its belt—like homegrown concepts Manam, 8Cuts, and Ooma, the local franchise of Din Tai Fung, and Hayop, its newest Filipino restaurant in Singapore—the company has consistently made waves in the F&B industry.
In this article, we ask Abba Napa, the founder and director for creative development, and Eliza Antonino, the founder and managing partner, about what it really takes to scale a food business in a way that’s smart, sustainable, and true to the brand.
Building a culture within the company
The path to scaling a business isn’t linear, and success stories rarely happen overnight. It takes vision, grit, and strategic thinking—from navigating operational challenges to ensuring consistency, all while adapting to new markets and emerging opportunities.
For Napa, scaling with quality goes hand in hand with growth, as it is “something that is extremely important and essential.”
“Scaling means you are no longer able to be in every kitchen, dining room, and meeting room 100 percent of the time. It’s just impossible. There aren’t enough hours in the day,” she explains.
That’s where culture comes in. “Quality [also] means making sure that everyone on the team upholds the same level of standards that you have and that they make the same kind of decisions (or better!) you would make if you were in that room.”
“None of that can happen without investing a lot of time and energy into building a strong culture that permeates your organization on all levels—so that everyone is looking at the same North Star and rowing in the same direction with the same cadence,” the restaurateur stresses.
Growth without compromise
Even with systems and a stable workplace culture in place, one question arises: How do you scale without losing what made you special in the first place? For restaurateurs, expansion raises the fear of dilution—that a bigger footprint might mean a weaker brand.
“There was a time when I didn’t want to have multiple locations for the restaurant brands we created,” Napa confesses. “I had this misguided perception that if you weren’t a one-off, independent restaurant, you couldn’t be distinctive, and that it would be very difficult to be able to uphold the same standards of quality if you had dozens of locations versus just one”
Napa admits she once felt the same way. “There was a time when I didn’t want to have multiple locations for the restaurant brands we created,” she confesses. “I had this misguided perception that if you weren’t a one-off, independent restaurant, you couldn’t be distinctive, and that it would be very difficult to be able to uphold the same standards of quality if you had dozens of locations versus just one.”
But growth had other plans. What began as a vision of initially creating a portfolio of one-off restaurants evolved into having multiple branches for all their restaurant brands—plus Hayop, a spin-off Filipino concept that recently opened in Singapore.
“We never planned it this way,” Napa admits. “But it happened, I’d like to think, because we worked hard on upholding our quality inside the four walls of our restaurant and doing our best to maintain our brand identity and equity, day in and day out.”
“In every single neighborhood we opened in, we followed the same process in building, training, and opening that we did the first time,” she explains. “We don’t cut corners on pre-opening weeks and dry runs, no matter the cost. Over the years, our kitchens have gotten bigger in each new location, not smaller. Our teams have grown, too, with new positions created to better serve our diners and provide, hopefully, an even better experience each time.”
“Could we find ways to become more efficient merely to pocket more profit? Yes. But continuously investing in the things that made us great in the beginning is what will keep us growing in the future. That’s where the real value is—both for the diner and for our restaurant brands”
And while, admittedly, this is a more costly route, Napa stresses that it’s because “we’re in it for the long haul.”
“Could we find ways to become more efficient merely to pocket more profit? Yes. But continuously investing in the things that made us great in the beginning is what will keep us growing in the future. That’s where the real value is—both for the diner and for our restaurant brands,” she says.
Why cutting corners isn’t worth the cost
Scaling a brand comes with its fair share of risks—including the temptation to cut costs at the expense of quality and consistency, along with, in Napa’s words, “getting lured into the allure of finding efficiencies and value-engineering for the sake of it.”
“Cutting corners and finding real economies of scale are two different things,” the restaurateur explains. “The latter will present itself to you as you expand, as long as you continue to stay intimate with your business. Meanwhile, the former can sink you if it is taken to an extreme and you inadvertently end up chipping away at the valuable facets of what made your restaurant successful to begin with.”
The solution? “[Having] a good culture that brings about a team that cares and respects leadership, a strong 360-degree feedback loop that is real-time in its cadence, and key stakeholders or teams that are 110 percent in sync with one another 24/7—from customer engagement to quality management, and operations,” she reveals.
At the end of the day, scaling shouldn’t come at the cost of what makes the brand resonate in the first place. For The Moment Group, it’s not about growing fast—it’s about growing the right way. And that means building a strong foundation that lasts.
Scaling your business? Maintain quality and consistency
Maintaining quality and consistency begins with having a strong culture. But having ironclad systems is just as important.
This includes having standard operating procedures. And Napa knows that for a fact. “If you can’t be in all rooms at every moment of the day, it is key that you have a playbook that everyone is aware of, can abide by, and can refer to. There is culture, and then there are systems.”
“I think the most important thing is communication [and] being open with what our standards are,” founder and managing partner Eliza Antonino explains. “What we can and can’t accept are all written down, in clear-cut agreement with our partners. It doesn’t matter how big or small they are”
Another success secret? Having a strong relationship with suppliers.
“I think the most important thing is communication [and] being open with what our standards are,” Antonino explains. “What we can and can’t accept are all written down, in clear-cut agreement with our partners. It doesn’t matter how big or small they are. We have specific contracts, letting them know the specs and quantity we need. All this helps both parties have a better relationship together.”
But maintaining consistency goes beyond paperwork—it starts with the team on the ground. “When a plate comes out, it touches four hands—the chef who cooks, the chef who plates, the chef who expedites, and the server who brings it to the tables,” Antonino says simply. All of them need to know what the standards are. All [of them should be] empowered to correct any mistakes and maintain these standards.”
“On top of that, as we scaled, we created and now maintain different audit programs, which include regular periodical checks by internal teams as well as a mystery shopper program, with third-party auditors,” she explains.
Building a strong team with equally strong standards begins with proper training, which they take very seriously over at The Moment Group. “Depending on the position, training new staff takes anywhere from 30 to 90 days,” Antonino reveals. “We do mentorships and peer-to-peer training, with a focus on more practical training over classroom sessions.”
“We try to espouse a culture of learning every day. We have a set of standard operating procedures that are cascaded to all our shops, and we maintain an audit program and offer refresher courses throughout the year.”
“Depending on the position, training new staff takes anywhere from 30 to 90 days,” Antonino reveals. “We do mentorships and peer-to-peer training, with a focus on more practical training over classroom sessions”
And while credentials and experience are always a plus, Antonino notes that what really sets candidates apart at the Moment Group is a blend of grit and moxie.
“I think all of us in the industry will look for chefs and managers with experience. [But we’re looking for] the kind of people who persevere through challenges and difficulties and strive to achieve excellence,” she says.
Listening, learning, and leveling up
In the end, there’s no blueprint for scaling a brand. It varies from business to business. But ultimately, all it takes is a whole lot of grit, good systems, and the guts to do things your way.
Just like everything else, learning is part of the process. “At Moment, we take feedback from all communication channels very seriously. These channels include our own feedback email, social media accounts, reviews, and direct complaints in our restaurants,” Napa explains.
“All of our teams in the shops are empowered to assist guests and address their complaints, particularly with food quality,” she adds. “It’s important to listen and be open to every single feedback—both positive and negative. We have a customer engagement team that oversees, monitors, gathers feedback, and cascades data regularly to all stakeholders in a feedback loop.”
The result? “Over the years, we’ve created processes that help us identify and understand the root causes, create actionable insights, and devise ways to address the issues as soon as possible,” Napa says proudly.
But it doesn’t just stop at listening—it’s about using that insight to adapt. After all, factors like prices, customer perceptions, preferences, and tastes change over time.
“Maintaining quality doesn’t necessarily mean keeping things exactly the same,” Napa opines. “Quality is a perception, and that perception evolves over time as the dining public grows and evolves as well”
All these redefine the very concept of quality. “Maintaining quality doesn’t necessarily mean keeping things exactly the same,” she opines. “Quality is a perception, and that perception evolves over time as the dining public grows and evolves as well.”
“Perception is influenced by a number of things—taste, price, experience, etc.,” she adds.
Ultimately, it’s a collection of insights, instincts, and intentionality that form the building blocks for a business to scale. With dozens of branches across Metro Manila, The Moment Group is now gearing up for its first foray into Cebu—bringing Manam, Din Tai Fung, 8Cuts, Ooma, and Mo’ to the Queen City of the South from June to July of this year.
“The understanding we gain is the lens by which we look back at what we are offering and what we’ve created—to see how we cannot just maintain quality but, hopefully, even make the entire experience better over time for our diners,” the restaurateur ends.
