Running a food-tech company – KloudKitchen

We got the right resources in place at the best locality in Bangalore to ensure that the food delivery is designed for convenience. We took a commercial space for setting up our kitchen but still we negotiated with the owner and got the space at a very minimum budget. Thanks for his encouragement for a startup. 

Initially it took time for us to start as we had very little experience in handling kitchen operations. It took off well. We did initial promotions by distributing pamphlets at all the major hot-spots. We got good number of leads with this campaign. 

We started talking to few companies for possible tie-ups to cater everyday lunch and snacks to employees. We listed our Restaurant with all the food-ordering apps that are out there in the market. We started getting leads from our partner food-delivery apps. We partnered with food catering agents who gave us leads to companies for daily catering. Hence we started building a vibrant partnership ecosystem creating complimentary services for all food ordering companies.  

About our product: We are specialied in catering North Indian dishes, mainly into deliverying thali. We have priced our product based on the factors considering what our customers can pay us for everyday meals, in the range of Rs 80 to Rs 120, including deliveries. 

Kitchen Operations: For most of the people, running a kitchen, managing and retaining cooks, managing cash-flows is a challenge. We took a pledge to take this as a challenge and hence we own our own kitchen, cooking team and support staff. 

Food is both a social and personal choice. We use food to socialize in various occasions and parties and also everyone is very particular about what dishes they want to eat and how much. It’s very personal. 

We are living in that hyper-thought age where our needs are changing every second. In this way, fulfilling thousands of customers with their choice of food and ensuring that we are becoming their food partners for lifetime is challenging. We are in the process of doing that. There are leaps and bounds everywhere. We have our own challenges in hiring right people for right positions, which is very important for a startup. 

Then comes the  logistics. We have to reach the customer in 45 minutes of time. The weather, traffic, limited delivery guys, lack of training for them, etc  on which we are working on. We are working positively on all these. We have partnered with Roadrunnr and Opinio for our logistics. But their cost of charging Rs 45 on average for every food delivery is not suitable for us to scale up. The cost of B2B deliveries is going becoming costlier than Ola and Autos. Hence there is an opportunity for us to think big here. The price of deliveries should be set for what my customer can pay me, not for covering up our unsustainable expenses. 

What we are aiming to do? – A Million food deliveries per day.  

Why ? Because there is so much need to deliver healthy and homely meals to everybody in time, at an affordable cost. School going children do not have proper breakfast in the morning, cos the parents are busy with their job schedules. The working class do not have time to purchase groceries and vegetables and cook. We are spending too much on unwanted food. It’s very important to keep good food habits.

Hence we at KloudKitchen are committed to build a global food delivery system by  owning a central kitchen at all the locations we operate. We do not want to become platforms/aggregators/marketplaces etc for deliveries. 

Starting monthly subscriptions: We did not plan this. But our customers are  liking our food and few customers started paying us on a monthly basis, where they need not open our website/app to order meals every day. We mark their locations in our delivery maps and the delivery guy already knows his/her address. So he can reach without calling every  time. This helps us to optimize order deliveries / time / resources for logistics. Example: One guy can do minimum 6 deliveries in 1 hour if we do the proper routing of known addresses. 

Office Catering: We supply meals to aggregators / marketplaces. We do nearly 25% of our orders for office meals every day. 

No Marketing: May be a good thing / bad thing. We have not marketed Kloudkitchen in any digital media. Now we have understood a bit about cashflows, wastages, resource allocations, hiring right people for right job. We have slowly started marketing activities now. 

Running the race: More than 300 orders we fulfill every day is through word of mouth / food ordering apps / partner networks. This is done by a small team of 6 people in total. We have kept our operational expenses to the optimum. The salary we pay is not is also to the market standards.

Finally:

Make profits from Day 1.  Whoever has a viable financial plan for the growth wins the game. It’s very important to optimize spending of every single rupee at every level. We are seeing good progress with this bootstrapped food-delivery venture which we hope with the hot-bot for every venture capital to be in our team in future. Train your teammates from day 1 on their roles. Let there be transparency and clarity for everyone about your journey. It’s like bringing up your child. We always have that conservative culture and run the company like how our mother runs the home. She many times cooks with limited resources. Never complains about what is not available. If you can be the mother for your family (company ), we do not need more strategies to run the company. 

I wish everyone a great success for your ventures. Let’s work to build a great BHARATH!

Thanks for your valuable time.

@g_datt