Foodics, the MENA-focused restaurant management and payments technology company, has launched Table Talks, an invite-only dinner series in the UAE that pairs the stories of restaurant founders with the operational data behind their growth. The company said the first edition was held on 18 June at Lila Molino in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue.
Pitched as a recurring, community-led initiative, Table Talks is designed to bring together restaurant founders, operators, creators and hospitality professionals for candid conversations about building and scaling food businesses. Foodics said the format deliberately moves away from conference-style panels, instead gathering a small group inside a working restaurant — in this case Lila Molino’s production kitchen — to combine founder storytelling with what it called data-backed business reality.
The inaugural session featured chef and entrepreneur Shaw Lash, founder of Lila Taqueria and Lila Molino. After leaving a corporate career, Lash opened Lila Taqueria, a wood-fired taqueria built around heirloom Mexican corn, in 2023. She followed it with Lila Molino — an all-day dining space, coffee roastery, concept store and in-house masa production unit — in 2024, and added Tacos Caminos in 2025.
Using Lash’s group as a case study, Foodics shared figures on how the business has scaled from a single restaurant into a three-brand, five-location operation in three years. According to the company, the group has processed more than 85,000 orders through its platform, while Lila Molino recorded a 98% year-on-year increase in orders between 2024 and 2025 from one location alone. Foodics said its system ties together point-of-sale, sub-cashier stations and delivery-app orders in a single view of performance. The figures were supplied by the company.
The company also pointed to menu-level insights it said help operators make sharper decisions, citing a starter of chips, salsas and guacamole as a key entry-point dish and noting that some items saw demand rise by more than 400% in a single month. Foodics said Lila Molino now accounts for over 54% of the group’s lifetime orders — which it framed as evidence that data and operational discipline, not only new openings, can drive growth.
“Table Talks was created to bring our community together and uncover the stories behind successful hospitality brands and the decisions that drive their growth,” said Belal Zahran, chief revenue officer of Foodics. He said Lash’s journey showed that scaling a restaurant “requires operational discipline, consistency, and the ability to make informed decisions at every stage,” adding that the series aims to highlight “the real mechanics of growth in hospitality — the decisions, the systems, and the numbers that sit behind the guest experience.”
Founded in Riyadh in 2014, Foodics sells an all-in-one software and payments platform — spanning cloud point-of-sale, self-ordering kiosks, online ordering, business intelligence and embedded financial services — and says it powers more than 40,000 active restaurant branches across the Middle East and North Africa. The company raised a $170 million Series C in 2022 led by Prosus and Sanabil Investments, followed by a strategic investment from Kuwait’s Kamco Invest.
Foodics said Table Talks will continue as a recurring series, convening founders and operators every few months. The launch reflects a wider trend among regional technology providers to build community and content around their platforms, positioning the vendor as a fixture in the industry it serves rather than only a software supplier. Whether the series becomes a durable draw will depend on the candor of the founders it features and the usefulness of the data Foodics chooses to share.
