Sweet December

Food tech has never been so hot. This will be a good time to take stock, if things have really changed on the ground or is it just a lot of money talking

Swiggy, in Bengaluru alone, does about 80,000 orders a day

The food tech duopoly may finally be breaking. There is now another option beyond Swiggy and Zomato

Freshmenu is probably the dark horse when it comes to the food tech conversation

The attitude of several VCs have started to change as well. Investors are looking at food tech companies without the technology

December 2017 was an interesting month. Zomato turned into a unicorn, with Alibaba’s $200 million finally landing. Foodpanda was bought by Ola in December for about $32 million. Ola’s CEO Bhavish Aggarwal pledged to invest $200 million into one of the oldest restaurant aggregators. Swiggy acqui-hired a cloud kitchen, 48East, strengthening its supply. Hot, up-and-coming cloud kitchen startup, Freshmenu, opened a restaurant at Bengaluru airport and flexed its muscles. It’s almost like all of the action in food tech was sandwiched in the last 15 days of 2017.

AUTHOR

Patanjali Pahwa

Patanjali has spent over seven years in journalism. He last worked at Business Standard as Principal Correspondent, where he wrote on startups, e-commerce companies and venture capital. He has worked at an array of institutions, which include Forbes India, Caravan and Outlook Business. He is a Mumbaikar, born and brought up. Patanjali did his BSc in IT from Mumbai University and then got his journalism degree from IIJNM in Bangalore. He is enamoured by Ernest Hemingway and Tom Waits and may try to sneak in references to them in his stories.

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