Technology v/s Real-estate: Why internet restaurants are future

“We are basically banking on technology v/s real estate. Real estate cost is always going up and technology cost is coming own,” shared Jaydeep Barman, Co-Founder, Rebel Foods who believed that it’s a personal decision on whether you want to bet put your money on technology or real-estate. “Technology has been our bet. Secondly, we have realized that technology is the only way to align three most important things- customer experience, growth and profitability,” he added.

There’s no denying that scale comes at a significant cost as change of behavior required billions of investor capital to create this market and get some portion addicted to instant gratification via online ordering. Also, all thanks to COVID for the tailwinds however these habits may not be permanent to scale. But in the last 18 month or so we have seen more and more restaurants and businesses turning down to technology, taking the delivery route. From India’s top restaurants to fine-dining brands all have taken this route to catch on the ever going demand of home dining.

Rebels Food that has become the top brand in the segment is today present in 7 countries, 50 cities across 400+ kitchens and building brand on internet. “People call us cloud kitchen company but fundamentally we are a restaurant kitchen; the only difference is that our restaurant is on internet,” added Burman who own brands like Behrouz Biryani, Faasos, The Oven Story Pizza to name a few.

Banking on Order Direct

“The Indian food service delivery market is expected to more than double to $13 billion (Rs 93,600 crore) by fiscal 2023 from $5.2 billion (Rs 37,440 crore) in fiscal 2020, aided by reduced meal preparation time due to fast-paced lives, increased need for instant meals and smartphone penetration,” said Samir Kuckreja, Founder of Tasanaya Hospitality and co-author of the delivery report along with Jasper Reid.

For Gauri Devidayal of The Table Mumbai that is a fine dining setting, desperation lead to rebooting the delivery side of the business. “We entered delivery last year. Being a small part of the business we never paid attention to it and left it to the aggregators, but when we paid attention to it we realized we have to set our own delivery fleet, knowing that there is limitation in it but having your own sort of tech it opened up the scope to do a lot more and that’s how we built on our own,” added Devidayal by pointing that as a restaurant owner the last thing you do is bring technology and want to have human interaction and intervention as much as possible.

She is also of the opinion that though one can’t ignore the aggregators but need to build their own capability as well.