Hello Curry acquires The First Meal

Quick service restaurant chain Hello Curry Pvt. Ltd has acquired The First Meal, a food and delivery startup which takes pre-orders for customized health food for cash and stock. The acquisition allows Hello Curry to enter the breakfast and meal box segment.

The food tech startup industry has been facing shutdowns. Lack of sustainable growth models in a fragmented market and harder customer acquisition has seen investors shying away too, after the initial euphoria. Hello curry which specializes in Indian food has been positioning itself as a quick delivery, hygienic, and convenient chain. This acquisition is Hello Curry attempt to draw a sustainable revenue model for the long term, even as its 33 outlets in Hyderabad, Pune, and Bengaluru remain profitable.

The company is in the process of raising $2-3 Million to take care of the regular growth plan in India and would separately raise funds for overseas expansion in a few months. The First Meal has a subscription platform and through their meal box concept it provides nutritious and consciously prepared food. Subscriptions can be profitable as the business as the business is predictable and Hello Curry would only leverage the existing kitchens and infrastructure it has to reach the subscription customers.

Through First Meal, the company aims to sell 5,000 meals every day, within the next six months. Currently First Meal serves five types of diet balanced breakfast items and daily changing nutritious lunches, tapping around 10,000 boxes a month, with 89% customer retention rate.

Jugnoo acquires Bistro and Yelo

India’s Jugnoo, a ten month old start up that has apps for both auto rickshaw rides and food delivery had acquired Bistro, a restaurant discovery app and Yelo, a services marketplace. The deal size of both the start-ups combined is said to be worth $1 Million in cash and stock.

With this acquisition, Jugnoo wants to strengthen its position in the hyper local service. Bistro, an eighteen month old startup, provides a DIY Platform for broadcasting offers and managing loyalty for restaurants. The app helps build, execute, and monitor customer engagement and brand loyalty campaigns. Yelo, a one year old startup offers a networking app for freelancers and part timers.

Jugnoo runs three apps- Jugnoo Autos, Jugnoo Meals, and Jugnoo Fatafat. The Jugnoo Autos app, started in November 2014, is like Uber for auto rickshaw rides. The other service is Jugnoo Meals, launched in February, which offers home delivery of freshly home cooked food with a rotational menu. The meals are cooked by Jugnoo in house chefs and are delivered within 30 minutes of placing the order.

Jugnoo launched Jugnoo Fatafat in April, a hyper local commerce marketplace for home delivery of fresh groceries. Earlier, Jugnoo acquired cab aggregator Bookmycab to enter the taxi aggregator space in bigger cities like Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Pune. After the acquisition, Jugnoo managed to cross 10,000 daily transactions. The startup secured $5 Million in seed funding from Snow Leopard and Paytm three months ago. It competes with Ola and Uber.

Dineout acquires inResto Service

Hotel Reservation Platform Dineout has acquired Bengaluru based inResto Service Pvt. Ltd. Dineout, part of Times Internet Ltd was founded in 2012. It has listings of over 20,000 restaurants and operates in seven Indian cities. Dineout has raised an undisclosed amount in funding so far in January 2014.

Food tech companies have been adding new services to consolidate its market share in the fast growing space. Deepinder Goyal founded Zomato Media Pvt. Ltd. launched services to reserves a table, book cabs and make payments on its app as well. InResto has so far seated over 1 Million restaurant diners in three cities in the six months since its launch.

The acquisition will ensure that restaurants get one dashboard to manage different functions like reservation, home delivery, takeaways, customer feedback and mobile payments and other restaurant management function. Post the acquisition the whole team at inResto will join Dineout in Bengaluru.

In coming months, Dineout is planning to launch a developer platform that will enable any service across the food tech ecosystem to integrate with them to reach a wider set of restaurants. 

American Burger Chain Carl Jr to enter India

Carl Jr is an American Based Fast food restaurant chain, operates in Western and Southwestern states. As of 2013, it started expanding in Canada, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Rico, Malaysia, Denmark, New Zealand, Singapore, Russia, Vietnam, Thailand, UK, and China. Carl Karcher is the founder of this chain and started operation in 1941. It is in the top ten fast food chains in the United States after Subway, McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King, Wendy, Taco Bell, Popeyes, and Church Chicken.

In April 2015, Indians will have choice to taste charbroiled burgers by Carl Jr. This brand has been endorsed by the like of Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, and Padma Lakshmi. The American fast food chain has already signed a franchise agreement with city based Cybiz BrightStar Restaurants Pvt Ltd, owned by CybizCorp. Over the next five years, there would be at least 100 Carl Jr outlets in India. The chain targets to open about 1,000 outlets across India over 10-15 years.

Carl Jr joins the race with the world’s largest burger chain Burger King, which had formed a joint venture with private equity fund Everstone Capital last year to develop its presence in India and plans to open the first outlet in India on 9 November 2014. The chain would spend $25 Million in the first five years in developing a presence in India. CKE Restaurant Holdings, the parent company of Carl Jr had already invested $1.5 Million in India in Consumer Research, product development and tasting trials during the past three years.

In a recent report, it is noted that Indian Food service market will soar to $92 Billion by 2020 from $48 Billion. Of this, the $3 Billion chained restaurant segment is expected to see the fastest growth rate of 15 percent, with the size pegged to touch $8 Billion by 2020.