BalrajCurefoods, a cloud kitchen startup, has announced the acquisition of five more direct-to-consumer food brands. In 2022, the company plans to rapidly expand its scale and footprint in order to become one of the largest players in this space.
Courtesy: Curefoods
The five acquired brands include Cupcake Noggins, Juno’s Pizza, Nomad Pizzas, Iceberg, and White Kitchens. Furthermore, by mid-2022, the cloud kitchen startup wants to add five more brands to its portfolio. The company, which was founded in 2020, already runs 75 kitchens across ten Indian cities.
Curefoods now has more than 20 brands in its portfolio and plans to have a total of 25 brands by mid-2022, significantly strengthening its D2C offering. The company has massive plans to extend its presence in the following year, with 200 outlets dispersed across 20 cities.
Post-acquisition, the Bengaluru-based cupcake brand – Cupcake Noggins will merge with CakeZone operations and plans to expand across Bengaluru over the next six months. While Juno’s Pizza, the Mumbai-based legacy pizza brand seeks to grow in size and penetrate in Western India. Iceberg, the organic ice cream brand, is quite popular in Bengaluru and parts of Andhra Pradesh. Iceberg aims to expand across more than 15 cities in India as a result of its acquisition. Nomad Pizzas, a gourmet pizza restaurant based in Delhi, has plans to expand to different locations around the country. White Kitchens, a multi-brand cloud kitchen firm based in Jaipur, will, on the other hand, be crucially important to Curefoods’ Tier 2 expansion strategy.
Curefoods’ scale expertise, as well as technological know-how in the food business, will facilitate the acquired brands in improving efficiency and output by leveraging a common technology and analytics platform. Under Curefoods’ guidance, these brands will also experience increased expansion – either within their native place or to newer cities – as well as the capital infusion as needed to build the business. The cloud kitchen startup will also assist them with branding and marketing strategies, which will increase revenue.
Ankit Nagori, Founder of Curefoods commented on the acquisition saying, India’s online food delivery business is expected to reach $8 billion by 2022, and the company hopes to play a significant role in influencing this segment. Curefoods is integrating these brands into its company by leveraging its end-to-end farm-to-fork technologies and a consumer-focused marketing stack. Furthermore, it claims that its experience in maintaining central kitchen facilities will enable it to drive these acquired food brands as well as help them expand at a rapid rate.
Curefoods, in October last year, announced the acquisitions of seven food brands, including Parathabox, ChaatStreet, and CakeZone. It has obtained exclusive online rights for Aligarh House, Sharief Bhai, and Yumlane, in addition to these acquisitions.