Rebel Foods, India’s largest cloud kitchen chain, which operates Faasos, Oven Story, Firangi Bake, and Behrouz, is planning to use its kitchen infrastructure to expand beyond its own cooked meal brands. This will be done by diversifying into ready-to-cook kits, meats, packaged snacks, as well as scaling other restaurants by investing in 12 brands this year, Jaydeep Barman, CEO of Rebel Foods, informed.

The food company speculated to be valued at about $1billion, said growth in India is increasing by 10 per cent every week, but it is still slow compared to international markets and may take five months at least to reach numbers seen before the Covid-19 outbreak. “In India I think there'll be a natural tendency towards more at-home cooking and consumption. We are creating an umbrella under a program called Eat.Sure and giving this platform for other food entrepreneurs to come on board and build brands around ready-to-cook, ready-to-eat, ready-to-use, and so on,” Barman said.

The idea is to extend cases beyond restaurants and create products for customers for use in homes. “We will be onboarding brands which adhere to the overall principle of great ingredients, no adulteration, no preservatives, no added colour follows hygiene protocol and so on,” he said.

The move will give Rebel Foods an opportunity to leverage its existing kitchen infrastructure across 35 cities to add new use cases for consumers at a time when food delivery volumes at dominant players Swiggy and Zomato are down by at least 70 per cent and only marginally increasing over weeks.

It also comes at a time when both platforms have significantly downsized their cloud kitchen infrastructure citing poor utilization of properties. “In times of crisis, people gravitate towards their core competence which for many of these guys (Swiggy and Zomato) has been logistics, marketplace models, delivery,” Barman said. “We run a much tighter, more efficient ship.”

In April, Rebel raised an additional $50 million from existing investor, US-based hedge fund Coatue Management. This came in months after the Mumbai based firm closed a $125 million round from Coatue along with the participation from the investment arms of ride-hailing major GoJek and Goldman Sachs.

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