Saudi Arabia’s banks pushed SR467.7 billion ($124.7 billion) into small and medium businesses last year, a 33 percent jump that lifted SME credit to 11.5 percent of all bank lending. Of that pile, just SR83.3 billion landed at micro-enterprises, where almost every independently owned premium restaurant in Riyadh sits.
Zeid Husban thinks that distribution gap is where the next Saudi asset class is hiding. The co-founder of SPICE, who has already sold two regional food-tech ventures, is wagering his third on the idea that diner spending, not concrete or kitchen equipment, can fund the Kingdom’s fine-dining boom.
The Gap Between Bank Books and Restaurant Counters
The headline credit figure looks like a banking system opening up. The distribution underneath tells a different story. According to Arjun Vir Singh, partner and global head of financial services at Arthur D. Little, medium-sized enterprises absorbed SR220.9 billion of last year’s SME credit, while micro-enterprises with annual revenue below SR3 million captured roughly SR83.3 billion. That is where most independently owned premium concepts live.
Restaurant sales are climbing about 7 percent annually, according to Bain & Co. estimates the founders cite in pitch decks. Vision 2030 is feeding that growth from two sides at once: giga-projects pulling fresh hospitality investment into Diriyah, Red Sea, NEOM and Qiddiya, and a tourism inflow that hit 122 million visitors and SR300 billion in spending in 2025.
Singh frames the issue as a distribution problem, not a supply one. “Capital is available, but it is concentrated where underwriting is easiest rather than where growth is most dynamic,” he told Arab News. The bank lending share for SMEs is up from 9.6 percent of total portfolios a year earlier. The Vision 2030 target for SME bank lending sits at 20 percent, leaving an 8.5-percentage-point gap that fintech and alternative lenders are racing to fill.
SPICE’s Wager on Dining as an Asset Class
The latest entry in that race comes from founders who have built next to restaurant cash flows for a decade without financing them. Husban built ifood.jo, Jordan’s first food aggregator, sold to Delivery Hero and rebranded as Talabat across the region. He followed it with POSRocket, a cloud point-of-sale system bought by Riyadh-based Foodics. Both businesses watched the money pass through. Neither put any in.
The Mechanic
The capital structure is the novelty. The platform pre-purchases future food credits from a premium restaurant, handing over upfront capital that the operator can use to fit out a venue, open a second location, hire chefs, or stock inventory. Funding is Shariah-compliant and non-dilutive: no debt instrument, no equity stake, no personal guarantee. Repayment runs through the app, which routes diner spending back to settle the credit balance.
The same app gives diners 20 percent uncapped cashback at participating venues. That doubles as a marketing engine for the restaurant partners, tying every reward dollar to a measurable footfall they would otherwise spend on advertising blind.
The Track Record
Cool Inc at Via Riyadh anchors the first cohort, putting London imports such as Gymkhana and Berenjak on the platform. Both are asset-light, brand-driven operators, exactly the profile traditional banks struggle to underwrite. SPICE has launched on Apple and Android stores exclusively in the Kingdom, a deliberate Saudi-first sequence the founders say will only replicate across the Gulf once the home market proves out.
Husban told Arab News the headquarters choice was strategic. “Saudi Arabia gave us the space to take risks, to move fast, and to build something that did not exist before. There is genuinely no better place in the world right now to create a new category from scratch.”
Why Bank Underwriting Misfires at the Table
Singh, who advises regional banks on credit strategy, listed three structural reasons traditional lenders fall short for premium restaurants:
- Approval speed. Timelines measured in weeks do not match the pace at which operators secure locations, expand, or chase a tourism-driven demand spike.
- Collateral mismatch. Asset-based underwriting is poorly suited to businesses whose value sits in concepts, chefs, and customer loyalty rather than tangible property.
- Cash-flow rhythm. Fixed repayment schedules clash with revenues that swing on seasonality, Ramadan cycles, Hajj traffic, and tourism flows.
The consequence, he added, is that premium operators default to informal capital: family money, supplier credit, and community-based funding. “In practice, the real competition is not between financial institutions, but between formal finance and informal funding sources,” he said. That framing reverses the usual fintech pitch, in which alternative lenders are competing against incumbent banks. The actual battleground is invisible household balance sheets.
That informal pool is also why a bank may decline a venue that later thrives. The restaurant did not lack capital. It lacked the kind a regulated institution could price. Our prior reporting traced how Saudi premium dining is outrunning bank credit as transaction data replaces collateral in the underwriting model.
The Numbers Behind the Bet
The Saudi foodservice market is projected to reach $62.7 billion by 2033, growing more than 8 percent annually, according to industry forecasts the platform cites in its investor materials. Restaurants and cafes already account for 29 percent of all point-of-sale transactions in the Kingdom, a SR99 billion flow running through terminals and e-invoicing pipes that did not exist five years ago.
Federico Piro, partner at Bain & Co., said the region’s volume growth is what makes the wager thinkable in the first place. “Markets like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are growing volumes by around 4 to 6 percent, compared with a global average of less than 2 percent,” he told Arab News.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Saudi tourist arrivals, 2025 | 122 million | Ministry of Tourism |
| Tourism spending, 2025 | SR300 billion ($81 billion) | Ministry of Tourism |
| Vision 2030 visitor target | 150 million annually | Vision 2030 program |
| Foodservice market by 2033 | $62.7 billion | Industry projections |
| Restaurants and cafes POS share | 29 percent (SR99 billion) | SPICE / SAMA POS data |
| SME credit, 2025 | SR467.7 billion | Arthur D. Little / SAMA |
| Micro-enterprise share of SME credit | SR83.3 billion | Arthur D. Little |
Two numbers in that table do the work of justifying the rest. A 122 million arrival base with a 150 million target leaves 28 million additional visitors to absorb before 2030, most of them international and most of them spending on premium experiences. If the foodservice market doubles into the next decade as projected, every percentage point of capital that shifts from informal to formal channels becomes a sizable lending book in its own right.
When Data Itself Becomes Collateral
The infrastructure layer is what shifts the underwriting math. Saudi Arabia’s e-invoicing rollout, open banking framework, mandatory payroll reporting, expanded credit bureau coverage, and dense POS network now generate a real-time picture of restaurant cash flow that did not exist in 2020. Lenders pricing risk off that data stream do not need property liens.
Restaurant POS data now captures revenue patterns, customer behavior, and seasonality in real time, making revenue traction effectively the new collateral.
That line from Singh explains why an alternative lender can move on a venue’s first 90 days of trading rather than waiting for two years of audited statements. Paolo Misurale, also a partner at Bain & Co., put the operational consequence bluntly. “Success will depend less on innovation alone and more on scaling what works efficiently, supported by data and AI to improve forecasting, availability, and shelf conversion,” he told Arab News.
On the floor itself, AI-driven menu engineering, demand forecasting, dynamic pricing, and personalised guest engagement are shifting from competitive edge to operating floor. Operators who run the math get cheaper credit and tighter margins. Operators who do not feed clean data into the system stay invisible to the new lending model, even when their kitchens are full.
What Could Vindicate or Sink the Wager
The bet’s softest point is institutional recognition. Demand-backed dining capital is not yet a recognised asset class in Saudi regulatory or institutional investor frameworks. Husban said the next phase needs capital providers, investors, and institutions to build a deeper understanding of what demand-backed dining finance looks like as an instrument before pension funds and family offices allocate to it at scale.
Two near-term tests sit on the calendar. The first is restaurant performance through the next Hajj-Ramadan-summer arc, which will show whether platform-funded venues hold margin through Saudi Arabia’s natural seasonality dip without renegotiating credit terms. The second is the Public Investment Fund’s hospitality build-out at giga-projects, which keeps adding premium-dining real estate at a pace traditional banks cannot approve fast enough to fill. The fiscal backdrop matters too: the same Vision 2030 budget cycle that froze parts of the Saudi consultancy spend earlier this year is now redirecting capital toward private-sector lending.
If the first Riyadh cohort holds its margin and repayment cleanly through 2026, the model becomes the template the next dozen Gulf platforms copy, and bank lending share creeps closer to its 20 percent Vision 2030 mark on the back of asset-class redefinition rather than concrete and tile. If the cohort stumbles, premium dining keeps running on family money and supplier credit, and the SR83.3 billion micro-enterprise pool stays where it has been.
