As we are now in the midst of an unprecedented crisis, we realize that this is also an end of “normal” as we knew it . The new normal would need a different breed of interesting food brands — either restaurants or ready to cook or packaged food — in a “Digital First” way, thus reaching millions of customers at their homes across the nation. This can be achieved super fast by riding on our footprint of kitchens/fulfillment partners, our nationwide supply chain and a growing network internationally. We are seeking exciting “small yet growing” brands across the entire “food” spectrum — from “dining table” to “the kitchen” , from ready to eat to ready to cook — to come on our platform and scale super fast.
I believe, at WEUNGRY, we are probably attacking the last frontier of consumer internet — Food Service. Not food delivery, but actually running F&B (Food & Beverage) businesses. If you think about it, in almost all consumer service sectors, world’s most valuable companies are Internet companies: Retail: Amazon, Travel: Priceline, Commute: Uber, Hospitality: Airbnb, Home entertainment: Netflix. However, the only consumer sector, where the world’s top 500 most valuable companies are still the offline giants, is Food Service. McDonalds alone is worth $160 Billion. We believe, in the next decade or so, this will change. F&B behemoths shall be built on the cloud — making delicious food optimized for delivery at your doorstep, operating at a fundamentally altered economic structure. We strongly believe “food”- specifically the business of running restaurants — is the last frontier for consumer internet. If you look at most valuable consumer-facing businesses — travel, hospitality, retail, home entertainment, taxi/commute, they are all internet companies. In the last two decades, Amazon, Uber, AirBnB, Priceline and Netflix have overturned old behemoths such as Walmart, Hertz, Hilton, Amex, Blockbuster and the likes to become world’s most valuable companies.
We are building hundreds of virtual restaurant brands in the largest categories on the internet, using our fulfillment partner kitchens, our national supply chain and a home-grown end-to-end technology developed solely for managing this unique business — from inventory to customer experience. On top of this, we have built a significant level of robotics led automation in our kitchens — we fondly call this team of chefs, robotics engineers, industrial designers and software developers TRANSFORMERS, because they have fundamentally altered the way fresh cooking is done in a kitchen. We are not dependent on high street costly locations. We can operate from our designed-for-delivery cloud kitchens with a totally altered cost structure of running an F&B business. Our End-to-End Tech Platform includes from distinct google polygon architecture (dynamic delivery radius) for a multi-brand operation from a kitchen to managing each step of the kitchen ops — queueing, load / prep time, batching of orders, out of the door algorithms, to inventory prediction based on consumption data, personal recommendation engine, deep integration with every aggregator, last mile delivery app, everything was built on a tech stack developed by our Engineers and Product Managers.
The explosive growth of food delivery, led by aggregators and of the sales of restaurant brands worldwide (check McDonalds and Domino’s global sales and value growth over the last few years), point to one thing: just like every other consumer industry, Food and the business of restaurants is undergoing a structural shift wherein there are two parts — The Brand and The Distribution. However, there is one consumer-facing industry where the internet has made minimal inroads — the business of building restaurant brands. Surprisingly, no ‘real’ food company has leveraged the internet to build and create great food brands. I am not talking about food delivery companies such as Grubhub, Doordash, and Uber Eats. They are doing a grand job of building the market out. Instead, I am talking about actually creating and building delivery-only food brands and cuisines on the internet. Our team firmly believes that “food” is the last frontier for consumer internet and this presents a massive opportunity. Over the next 10 years, the ‘Kitchen’ as we know it will come under significant threat. Already, young independent people under 30 are ordering multiple meals during a week from one of several of their favorite restaurant brands. So far, no delivery-only company has scaled to a meaningful level, until we started realizing the power of the internet when applied to building and creating great cuisine brands is a complete game changer. So far no other company has harnessed the power of the internet and applied it to build great cuisine brands.
Finally, Food is the only consumer product, where small, local brands can be powerful and can be the growth engine.
You don’t say “the guy at the end of the street makes the best computer. mobile phone or shoe in the world”. But, You routinely say “that Mexican hole-in-the-wall place makes the best tacos ever”. That’s because Food is the most differentiated, most personal, most emotional of everything out there (barring your life partner). If someone makes a terrific muffin or a great kebab, everyone around notices irrespective of how many locations the maker has. In fact, the most endearing brands in Food are small and local. You just have to make great food (and not be an asshole, no, sorry, thats not correct— even assholes are accepted if they create great food). Not true for most other things in life. The internet should bring the ability to build small, delightful local brands at scale and keep the same location growing for ever. Stagnation, a century old problem with Food outlets, can be taken out of the equation.
WEUNGRY, is at the cusp of revolutionizing the business of building and running virtual restaurant brands, globally. We are the largest virtual restaurant brand company in the world, by a wide margin. Virtual food brands are poised to disrupt the most valuable restaurant brands domestically and eventually globally.
One of my favorite maxims is the one preached by Ray Dalio, the legendary investor.
Here is how it goes (roughly ):
What it basically means is, the only way to gain extraordinarily (with some probability greater than zero) is to follow paths untraveled, paths that everyone rejected and no one agrees with. None of us have any idea whether a decision will turn out to be right or wrong — it’s usually hindsight. But we can easily see, before taking a decision, whether what we are doing has been done before or not, whether people agree with it or not. If it has been done before and/or is favored by all and sundry, then there is no extraordinary return waiting for you, when the decision will have played out, irrespective of it being “right” or “wrong”.
GB
