An ecommerce pioneer, Ankit Nagori is the Founder of Curefoods, one of India’s fastest growing House of Brands and largest healthy food platforms. Soon after graduation in 2007, Ankit founded a social media startup - Youthpad, which he ran for three years. He then joined Flipkart as a manager, where he rose quickly among the ranks to spearhead the company’s operations as its Chief Business Officer.

In 2016, after a six-year tenure at Flipkart, which was marked by several groundbreaking initiatives launched by him, Ankit left the company to establish Cure.Fit, along with Mukesh Bansal. Cure.fit is an integrated health platform that provides all aspects of a healthy lifestyle in one platform. In his current role at Eatfit, his ambition is to grow the company further as a forerunner for healthy food that is fun and ‘desi’ at heart. Today, Curefoods as a company has created a brand identity not just as an online player but also as an offline player after acquiring several brands. Sbarro Franchisee is amongst one of the offline player that has expanded and grown into a fast evolving food market. Excerpts from the interview:

Cloud Kitchen as a Segment

Right before pandemic in the late 2019, early 2020, there was a very clear trend of people moving into online first brands for ordering. A few years back when online ordering was becoming a very big thing in India and globally, while a lot of old school restaurants were unable to cater to the online demands, due the right packaging, right portion sizing, and delivery on time. This is where a bunch of cloud kitchen companies across the world cropped up, and a lot of them in India as well.

EatFit was one of the leading players’ pre-pandemic as well. The requirement was simple -- single portion meals delivered fast and quick and in a hygienic packaging. So while at the peak of pandemic, cloud kitchens and online only kitchens were a big thing, post pandemic, the demand has decreased slightly, which is the natural progression. India is a brand starved country, but people are still ordering online. So either you can order from all the big American QSR chains or you can order from this single standalone restaurant. There's nothing in the middle where it's like Indian chains. That's where I think the Indian multi-brand cloud kitchen companies are fitting in, which means us. There's bunch of good competitors and I believe that this 15 to 20 percent year on year growth will continue for the next 10 years.  It means that in the next 10 years, a lot of these cloud kitchen players, including us, will become a pretty large part of the Indian F&B ecosystem, and in many cases, even surpass the American QSR.

Scaling Through Offline Channels

Eating out is still a large segment, and only a very small part of that has moved online where people now can at least think of celebrating indoors. They can watch a match together with friends at home, but it'll continue to be very, very social, this whole celebration aspect. Most of it actually happens in offline location because people also want to step out. So, a large part of the weekend ordering happens outside of home, and we don't want to miss out on that as well. A lot of our brands are celebration-based. We have Sharif Biryani where people can go out as a families or as friends and order biryani and eat there. We have a pizza brand called Nomad Pizza, which gives a high end experience of eating a pizza while at home. So, I think that if you really want to cover all 28 meal slots that we Indian eat in a week, it's super important to have at least 20-30 percent slots with offline ordering. That's the share of business that we've envisioned. In a couple of years we are expecting 25-30 percent of our revenue from offline business while we continue to build our core thesis of online first business.

What to Consider When Building House of Brands

I think to build a house of brands, it is important to figure out the core customer segment that you're catering to -- it has to be a large addressable audience. It cannot be a niche audience. Anything in India, which is very niche will not scale. We are here to build scalable businesses. So, we look at mass premium as the core segment.

Scaling for Growth

We’ve crossed the 600 crore business and on the verge of hitting 700 crores in the next couple of months. We already have 200 plus locations out there as a combination of online and offline. I think about half of that growth will just come from the same store growth. Annualized revenue will come from our offline foray. We are looking to launch 30 to 35 new offline outlets. Most of these offline outlets actually come with very high revenue base because they're mid-size, and have lot of customers walk-ins. I believe 50 percent of our growth from now on will come from same store growth and 50 percent will come from the new offline stores that we opened.

Transcribed by: Deeksha Tiwari
With Inputs From: S Shanthi