Bot Harbour

How to Sell to Restaurants & Cafés in Saudi Arabia: What 15,905 Venues Tell Us

Only 4% of Saudi restaurants and cafés publish an email; 83% list a phone. Here is how B2B sales teams should build their outreach list instead.

You sell something restaurants and cafés need: coffee beans, packaging, POS software, cleaning contracts, delivery tools. Your sales manager in Riyadh or Jeddah has a target for new accounts this quarter, and the question is simple: how do you actually reach these venues? We looked at the contact details that 15,905 restaurants and cafés across Saudi Arabia publish, and the answer is not the one most outreach playbooks assume.

Who this is for

This guide is for B2B sales teams selling into food and beverage in Saudi Arabia: suppliers, distributors, software companies and service providers. If your plan starts with "send an email campaign to 5,000 restaurants", read the next section first.

What the data says about reaching restaurants

In the Bot Harbour file of restaurants and cafés across Saudi Arabia, we counted which contact channels each venue lists:

  • Phone: 13,224 venues (83%). The phone is the one channel almost every venue shares.
  • Website: 4,880 (31%). Useful to check what they serve, how many branches they have and who owns the brand.
  • Instagram: 1,968 (12%). The strongest social channel, ahead of X (1,133), Facebook (1,089), TikTok (1,001) and Snapchat (789).
  • Email: 675 (4%). Fewer than one venue in twenty publishes an email address.
  • WhatsApp: 271 (2%) list a WhatsApp link directly, although many of the mobile numbers in the phone column also use WhatsApp.

The practical conclusion: an email-first campaign reaches a small, unusual slice of the market. A phone-first plan, supported by Instagram for brands that are active there, reaches most of it.

How to build your outreach list

  1. Start from a complete list, not a search session. Pull every restaurant and café in your target cities with name, city, phone, website and social links. You can start from the restaurants and cafés in Saudi Arabia dataset or have one built to your own brief.
  2. Split by channel. Make three groups: venues with a phone only, venues with phone plus Instagram, and venues with a website. Each group gets a different first touch.
  3. Segment by what you sell. Coffee and bakery suppliers should filter for cafés and bakeries; POS and delivery tools do better with multi-branch brands, which you can spot from their websites.
  4. Prioritise by city. Plan call days by city so a field visit can follow a good call in the same week.
  5. Load it into your CRM with one column per channel, so every rep can see which channel was used and when.

How to check a restaurant list before you pay

  • Call ten numbers from the sample. If more than two are wrong or disconnected, ask how and when the data was collected.
  • Open five websites and five Instagram links. They should belong to the same venue as the row, not to a directory or a different branch.
  • Check the category column. A restaurant file should not be full of hotels, groceries or unrelated shops. Mixed categories waste call time.

More detail on choosing a file is in our guide to the Saudi Arabia restaurants database for B2B sales.

What to do in the first two weeks

  1. Write a 20-second call opener: who you are, the one problem you solve for restaurants, and a simple next step (a sample, a tasting, a demo).
  2. Call in the late morning, before the lunch rush, and avoid the evening peak.
  3. For venues with Instagram, follow the account and send a short DM the same day you call, referring to the call.
  4. Log every outcome in the CRM: reached, call back, not interested, wrong number. Wrong numbers tell you how good your list is.
  5. After 20 conversations, look at which segment answered best and move your effort there.
  6. Keep it lawful: where a number or email belongs to a named person, Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) applies. Prefer business lines, say who you are, and stop when someone asks you to.

Frequently asked questions

Is email useless for selling to Saudi restaurants?

Not useless, but small: only 4% of venues in our file publish one. Use it for the venues that do, and for follow-up after a call.

Should I message restaurants on Instagram?

For the 12% that list Instagram, yes, as a second touch after a call. A DM alone is easy to miss in a busy inbox.

Can I get a list for one city only?

Yes. A ready file can be filtered by city, or you can request a custom dataset for the cities and venue types you need.