The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s (The Kingdom) ‘Saudi Vision 2030’ has and will continue to create amazing opportunities for the design and construction world from across the globe.  The need to reduce the Kingdom’s dependence on oil and diversify its economy has been well publicised, and many of the ‘giga projects’ are now starting to take shape and bring this vision to reality.

Over the last ten years Tricon has worked across the GCC Region, as part of the professional design team, on a series of similar projects from our work on six of the stadiums in Qatar for the 2022 World Cup, as part of Qatar Vision 2030, to Dubai’s long-term strategy to diversify its economy. This also includes our work on multiple projects across Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman.

Tricon has worked on many projects within the Kingdom over the last ten years, across several sectors.  One challenge we often face is to be appointed at the early stages of a project, where we believe we can have the greatest positive impact.  Our first work on one of the giga projects was therefore the perfect example of where we can truly add value, as here we were commissioned to review the masterplan relating to 27 planned hotels across a series of islands.  In outline this was to analyse the transportation logistics and central storage strategy for all identified F&B, laundry and waste materials.  A key pre-requisite for this project was to also consider the sustainable options available to reduce the environmental impact, both during construction and in-use.  Our report was delivered and our recommendations adopted into the preliminary planning.

A great strength, on many of the projects we are now working on within the Kingdom, is that Tricon employ both management and design consultant teams to work end to end on new developments.  This means at the onset of a project our management consultants can fully develop the F&B and waste strategy, business case and operational design brief in advance of the design stages.  This ensures that the whole team have bought into the vision of how F&B will work across the project and ensure the operators have the best facilities to produce great food and optimise profitability.

The hospitality sector has been identified as a key component, from both a future employment perspective and attracting international tourism and Saudi locals to travel and stay in the Kingdom, respectively.  While we see many of the global food brands in the Kingdom’s international cities, Saudi Arabia’s culinary scene is regionally diverse.  A key part of the challenge Tricon faces is to ensure the international and local cuisines are represented well on all projects.

Tricon’s projects across the Kingdom now include hotels, food-emporiums, theme-parks, stadia, sporting centres, central commissaries, corporate offices and academia.  As the projects start to develop, we are also being asked to take a more holistic view of how F&B operations can work most ergonomically and cost effectively across multiple operations within each development.  This over-view also ensures that all projects have a sustainable prescience, which is a key part of Saudi Vision 2030.