Kazakhstan's Ready-to-Eat Food Market: An Industry Worth Up to KZT 360 Billion Enters the Scaling Phase
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Ready-to-Eat Food Is Becoming a Separate Segment of the Economy
Kazakhstan's ready-to-eat food market is experiencing one of the most dynamic periods in its history. According to Veronika Daugaliyeva, Chairwoman of the Self-Regulatory Organization of Public Catering of Kazakhstan, the ready-to-eat food segment already accounts for 20–30% of the country's total foodservice turnover, with an estimated market size ranging from KZT 240 billion to KZT 360 billion annually (Source: Informburo, February 2026).
Just a few years ago, the market was largely limited to restaurant food delivery. Today, it includes central production kitchens, retailer private labels, subscription meal services, dark kitchens, and digital delivery platforms. In fact, a new industry is emerging in Kazakhstan at the intersection of food manufacturing, retail, and FoodTech.
Food Delivery Has Nearly Tripled in Two Years
The most dynamic segment remains online ready-to-eat food delivery.
According to the Bureau of National Statistics, in 2025 the volume of ready-to-eat food delivery services ordered online reached KZT 169.5 billion. This figure is nearly twice the level of the previous year and almost three times higher than it was two years earlier.
Such growth rates are exceptional even by e-commerce standards and reflect a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. For millions of residents of Almaty, Astana, and Shymkent, ready-to-eat food is gradually becoming not an additional service but an integral part of everyday life.
Restaurants' Own Platforms Are Becoming a New Growth Driver
One of the most interesting trends in recent years has been the development of restaurants' own digital sales channels.
By the end of 2025, foodservice establishments generated KZT 93.2 billion in sales through their own websites and mobile applications. For comparison, the figure stood at only KZT 2.6 billion a year earlier.
This growth demonstrates restaurants' desire to reduce dependence on aggregators and establish direct relationships with customers. For businesses, this means lower commission expenses, access to customer data, and higher order profitability.
In essence, the market is shifting from an aggregator-centric growth model toward an omnichannel sales model.
Aggregators Continue to Dominate FoodTech
Despite the growth of restaurants' own channels, aggregators continue to maintain significant influence.
In 2025, orders worth KZT 76.3 billion were placed through delivery platforms. The market leaders remain Wolt, Glovo, Yandex Eats, and Chocofood.
Competition among these platforms has resulted in substantial improvements in service quality, shorter delivery times, and the development of digital market infrastructure. However, the next stage of industry development is no longer delivery itself, but production.
Central Production Kitchens Are Becoming a New Industry
As demand for ready-to-eat food continues to grow, the market is gradually transitioning from a restaurant-based model to an industrial one.
In developed countries, a significant share of ready-to-eat products is manufactured not by restaurants but by specialized central production kitchens serving retail chains, delivery operators, corporate catering, and the HoReCa sector simultaneously. Kazakhstan is moving in the same direction.
A central production kitchen makes it possible to standardize product quality, reduce production costs, minimize raw material losses, and scale the business without proportional increases in operating expenses.
For this reason, the most promising investments in the sector today are directed not toward opening new restaurants but toward building modern production facilities.
Market Practice: The Lasushki Central Kitchen Case in Shymkent
The transformation of Kazakhstan's ready-to-eat food market is confirmed not only by statistics but also by real investment projects.
In 2022, I participated in the design and launch of the Lasushki ready-to-eat food central kitchen in Shymkent. At the time, the project became one of the largest ready-to-eat food production facilities in southern Kazakhstan and was designed to support its own retail network, develop the corporate catering segment, and further scale through modern distribution channels.
The total investment in the project amounted to approximately USD 1.5 million. The funds were allocated toward construction and modernization of production facilities, acquisition of modern processing equipment, establishment of refrigerated logistics, implementation of food safety standards, and automation of production processes.
The project's primary objective was to create an industrial-scale ready-to-eat food production model capable of maintaining consistent product quality while significantly increasing output volumes.
The results exceeded initial expectations.
Over four years, ready-to-eat food sales increased by more than 600%, while the project achieved full payback within approximately three years. For the food manufacturing industry and the ready-to-eat food segment, this represents one of the most illustrative examples of the effectiveness of an industrial production approach.
This growth was driven by several key factors:
standardization of production processes;
expansion of the product assortment;
development of in-house logistics;
implementation of modern storage and packaging technologies;
growing consumer demand for convenient meal solutions.
The Lasushki experience demonstrates that the future of the market belongs not to individual restaurants but to production platforms capable of supplying a wide assortment of products through multiple sales channels.
In effect, central production kitchens are becoming the new infrastructure of Kazakhstan's ready-to-eat food market and are creating the foundation for the industry's further growth.
The video below presents the Lasushki central kitchen in Shymkent and demonstrates the organization of production processes as well as the scale of modern ready-to-eat food manufacturing in Kazakhstan.
Outlook Through 2030
Today, Kazakhstan's ready-to-eat food market remains in an active growth phase and is far from saturation.
Per capita consumption of ready-to-eat meals remains significantly below the levels observed in developed European and Asian markets, leaving substantial room for future expansion.
Given current growth rates, the ready-to-eat food market could exceed KZT 500 billion in the medium term and become one of the largest segments of Kazakhstan's food industry.
The primary growth drivers will continue to be urbanization, the development of digital services, rising household incomes, the expansion of organized retail, and the scaling of central production kitchens.
The ready-to-eat food market has already evolved beyond being merely a part of the restaurant business. Today, it is an independent industry that combines manufacturing, logistics, technology, and retail. For investors, it represents one of the most promising segments of Kazakhstan's consumer market, while for producers it offers an opportunity to build the next generation of national brands.
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