INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
In May, venture capitalist Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital warned in a Financial Times column that Amazon’s recent $575 million
investment in the London-based delivery service Deliveroo could prove ominous for local restaurants
Wrote Moritz: “Amazon is now one step away from becoming a multi-brand restaurant company — and that could mean doomsday for many dining
haunts.”Moritz was right to attract more attention to the deal
Deliveroo has begun operating shared kitchens from which it will not simply transport food to customers but eventually prepare it, too
His warning may even have played a role in the recent decision of Britain’s competition regulator to halt work on Amazon’s investment so
it can first investigate whether the deal poses competitive concerns.Moritz knows the playbook because of Sequoia’s early investment in
Rebel Foods, formerly known as Faasos, a once-small Pune, India-based company that now prepares a variety of foods in its cloud kitchens
As he says in the same column, Faasos largely pioneered the trend.The growth of the nine-year-old company is a bit breathtaking — and
According to Bloomberg, Rebel — which this month raised $125 million in fresh capital from the Indonesian delivery service Go-Jek, Coatue
Management and Goldman Sachs — now operates 235 kitchens across 20 Indian cities
And it’s processing two million orders a month
(It calls itself the “world’s largest internet restaurant company.”)While it began life as a chain of kebab restaurants, that original
concept, Faasos, is now just one of eight other brands that Rebel operates, including a tea brand called Kettle - Kegs; a Chinese concept
called Mandarin Oak; a pizza brand called Oven Story; and a brand called Behrouz, through which Rebel makes and sells slow-cooked biryani
rice dishes.Rebel Foods isn’t the only fast-moving operator using cloud kitchens to offer every kind of cuisine imaginable under one roof
Competitors of the company — which tells Bloomberg it is now valued at $525 million — include UberEats and the food delivery company
Zomato, which itself has plans to open more than 100 cloud kitchens by the end of this year.Zomato says it isn’t getting into the food
preparation business — yet — but rather renting facilities, kitchen equipment and software to restaurants.Still, it’s little wonder
that Rebel is racing headlong into new markets as fast as it can
According to Bloomberg, the company is currently planning to build 100 cloud kitchens in Indonesia over the next 18 months, with Go-Jek’s
It also expects to open 20 cloud kitchen facilities in the United Arab Emirates by December.Rebel was founded by Jaydeep Barman, a native of
Mumbai with an MBA from INSEAD who spent nearly four years with McKinsey before joining forces with business school classmate Kallol
Banerjee to launch Faasos.Despite raising money early on from Sequoia, the company was once at risk of going out of business, in part owing
to high rents and employee turnover
As Moritz tells the story, things turned around dramatically when the duo closed their restaurants and opened their first centralized
kitchen.That decision would prove pivotal
Not only did Rebel survive, but today, the company tells Bloomberg, the entire operation runs the equivalent of 1,600 restaurants.
