i
Sri Lankan and South Asian hospitality is under-positioned globally, and the next decade will reward operators who build cultural specificity into their brand rather than chase international neutrality.
Food, beverage, and hospitality.
A consultancy named
A consultancy named
after a tin of
condensed milk.
Tin Kiri is a small studio for food, beverage, and hospitality businesses. We do brand, content, marketing, and digital. We take five clients at a time. We work with them over the long haul. We don't pitch. We don't do one-off projects.
What we believe.
Six things we'd stake the firm on.
We started Tin Kiri because we wanted to do creative work that takes the food business as seriously as it takes itself. These are the convictions the firm is built on.
ii
The mid-market F&B operator is the most underserved segment in creative services. Too small for global agencies. Too serious for freelancers.
iii
Long-term partnership beats project work. Always.
iv
The best creative consultancies are the ones that can read a P&L.
v
Brand isn't a logo refresh. Marketing isn't a content calendar. The only honest measure of creative work is whether the business is in a better place at the end of the year than it was at the start.
vi
The food business deserves the same intellectual seriousness as any other category, and gets it from too few people.
The cap.
Five clients at a time. That's it.
The work we want to do can't be done at scale. Most agencies serving F&B operators are structured to maximise client count and minimise time spent thinking. We've built Tin Kiri to align with the operator's economics, not the agency's. Fewer clients. Deeper relationships. Slower cadence. Longer thinking. It also means we say no a lot.
i
One
ii
Two
iii
Three
iv
Four
v
Five
How we work.
A small core team. A network of named specialists.
The people who pitch the work are the people who do the work. For specialist expertise that sits outside the core practice, we bring in named partners. We name them on the brief from the first conversation.
i
Brand and identity.
Naming, positioning, visual identity, tone. The foundation. We work on the brand as an answer to a business question, not as a graphic exercise. Every choice is defensible at the P&L.
ii
Content and editorial.
Long-form writing, social, photography direction. Most F&B content is wallpaper. Ours is built to do work. We treat the editorial output of a hospitality brand as seriously as its menu.
iii
Digital and web.
Custom sites, ordering flows, digital infrastructure. No templates. No page builders. Real engineering for businesses that take their digital presence as seriously as their dining room.
iv
Marketing and performance.
Paid, owned, earned. We run campaigns where every spend has a number attached to it, and we report against it without flattering the numbers.
v
Research and field studies.
We spend time inside other markets to understand what works and why. Bangkok, Singapore, Bombay, Tokyo, Lisbon. That fieldwork goes into client work and published essays.
vi
Specialist network.
Chefs, designers, operators, finance consultants. Named partners brought in per engagement. Kitchen concept, interior, F&B finance, supply chain. Repeat collaborators with a real relationship to the firm.
The founder.
The firm is led by someone who has spent twelve years in regulated industries and small-business operating, including a brief but instructive run as an F&B operator.
Hakiem Hanif started his career as a licensed stockbroker. He then trained as a chartered accountant. He spent the pandemic running a small cloud kitchen, sourcing ingredients, costing menus, fighting platform commissions, and watching orders come in (and not come in) on a Tuesday night.
The kitchen didn't last forever. But it left a permanent mark: an understanding that F&B is unlike any other category, and you can't understand it from the outside.
That experience sits alongside a manufacturing background, twelve years across regulated industries, and a long-running practice writing and producing content about business and economics in Sri Lanka. Tin Kiri is where those threads come together.
Hakiem Hanif
Founder and principal
If this sounds like the partner you're looking for,
let's talk.
We're a young firm with a long view. We're not pretending to be older or larger than we are. What we offer is depth, honesty, and the discipline to study the work properly before we do it.
hello@welovetinkiri.comWe read every email. We reply to the ones we can take seriously.