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innerChef, a Gurgaon-based start-up that makes and delivers ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook food, plans to expand to other metros in the next few months.
The six-month-old firm had raised ₹11 crore last week from a clutch of investors.
'These include Phanindra Sama, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Anupam Mittal, Vishal Gondal, Sateesh Andara, Dinesh Agarwal, Neeraj Roy, Roshan Abbas, Boris Raybov and Hiro San.
innerChef was founded by angel investor and entrepreneur Rajesh Sawhney along with Bal DiGhent and Sanjay Singhal.
The start-up recently launched a hyper-local desserts marketplace called ‘Indulge’, through which it delivers offerings from neighbourhood and home bakers.
10 more kitchens “We will use the funds to expand the footprint of innerChef and build 10 kitchens across Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru,” said Sawhney. “Part of the funds will also be used to scale up our hyper-local dessert marketplace to six cities — Noida, Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Mumbai — by the end of the year.”
The food business is a high-margin one and innerChef hopes to operate at 40-50 per cent margins as it scales up, he added.
“We will look at a bigger round of funding next year as we grow. For now, our funding requirements have been taken care of.”
Monthly sales The company initially launched ready-to-cook services, wherein it delivers boxes with chopped ingredients along with side-dishes and a cooking guide.
It then launched ready-to-eat meals, which now contribute nearly 80 per cent to its monthly sales, Sawhney said.
In August, it started offering snacks, which nearly doubled its orders.
The founders hope to aggregate about 1 lakh bakers across 100 cities nationwide in a year through Indulge. “By combining the disruptive ideas of innerChef, which is ‘kitchen in the cloud’, and Indulge, ‘the marketplace model’, we are creating a new template of growth for food companies,” said Sawhney.
Multiple start-ups are likely to emerge as significant pan-India players in the next few years, he added.
The company is set to launch an innerChef app shortly, and a separate Indulge app by next month.
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