Sagar Khanna

Sagar Khanna has spent his working life inside operations: eighteen kitchens across several markets, a stage at a Michelin restaurant in Bangkok, and more than thirty research projects on how businesses actually run. SDV-FZ OS is what came out of all of it.

He trained at IHM Aurangabad, the Tata Group’s hotel management institute, and graduated from the University of Huddersfield in innovation management and strategic management. The kitchens taught him what a service really costs. The study taught him why most attempts to fix that fail — and that a process nobody on the floor will follow is not a process.

He has been travelling since he was young, and most of it was work rather than holiday: different kitchens, different countries, different ways of running a team. That is where the interest in people, in culture and in how a room actually operates came from, and it is the half of this that no software teaches.

Among the businesses he has built is Querida Dubai, an independent Mexican restaurant in Al Barsha which he co-founded, opened in October 2024, and has run without investors or an expansion plan since. As he put it to Caterer Middle East: “We began as cooks. Today, we are business operators.”

That order — kitchens first, systems after — is why this software exists, and why it now runs two kinds of business: restaurants, and any company that sells to other businesses. He writes about operations from the operator’s side rather than the vendor’s: food cost that moves when a supplier price moves, a job whose margin is known the day a bill arrives, a day that closes on a phone, and books that stay done because nothing was typed twice.

Every workspace is loaded by hand before anyone uses it — the real menu, the real suppliers, the real numbers — because a system nobody put data into is a demo rather than an operating system.