How Thrive is looking to disrupt the food ordering market

Food discovery and ordering platform, Thrive, owned by Hashtag Loyalty, will be sharply focusing on ramping up its presence in the Mumbai market this year, before it expands to other cities. The platform, which is focusing on offering lower commissions for restaurants as a strategy, aims to garner 15 per cent share of the online ordering market in the cities where it will have a presence over the next three years. The start-up, which is backed by strategic investors including Coca-Cola and Jubilant Foodworks, is also in the process of joining Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC).

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Founded in 2020 by three entrepreneurs Dhruv Dewan, Karan Chechani and Krishi Fagwani, Hashtag Loyalty, launched its discovery and ordering application, Thrive, in Mumbai last year after extensive beta testing.

“Our value proposition for restaurants is that we offer lower commissions, and access to the customer data. When it comes to commissions, we offer different rates for new orders and repeat orders, which is a significant change from the current industry practices. We charge 14 per cent commissions for new customer orders from restaurant partners and 10 per cent for repeat orders,“ Karan Chechani, Co-Founder and CMO, Thrive, told businessline. 

Building connect

“Thrive also focuses on building a connection and loyalty between the restaurant and their end-consumers. That’s the key distinction. The way the industry has grown over the years, has led to aggregators becoming bigger brands than restaurants and we are trying to bring a change,” he added.

Currently, Thrive is serving 90 per cent of pincodes of Mumbai and has over 3,600 restaurant partners. It recently launched a campaign “Take Food Personally”, encouraging consumers to prioritise choice at a time when food ordering experiences have become highly-commoditised. “We believe food discovery and ordering is beyond just convenience and discounts. So our value proposition for the end-consumers is that we offer them a community-assisted experience and community-based recommendations to discover food options rather than a technology output of the platform,” he added.

Order volumes grow

In the past few months, the discovery platform has seen over 100 per cent growth in order volumes. “For the next 12 months, we will sharply focus on the Mumbai market. We want to ramp up the supply side and grow the restaurant partners’ count to 12,000-15,000 restaurants. We want to get our playbook right in one city before we launch in other cities,” Chechani said.

Talking about long-term plans, he added that the platform will aim to capture 15 per cent market share in the cities that it will be present in. “As the online ordering penetration grows in the next five years, and more and more Gen Z consumers begin earning, we believe there is immense potential for an online ordering platform to grow, that offers a differentiated value proposition to consumers,” he added.

Hashtag Loyalty, is also known for Thrive Direct that offers direct ordering solutions to restaurants and is currently enabling over 15,000 restaurants in 80-plus cities to fulfil direct orders from consumers. “We have been in talks to join ONDC for the past few months. We are initially looking to onboard as a seller app and work with over 17,000 restaurant partners that we have on Thrive Direct and Thrive consumer app,” Chechani explained.

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