Rebel Foods partners with Foodpanda to expand in APAC countries

Cloud kitchen company Rebel Foods on Thursday announced that it has partnered with food and groceries delivery platform Foodpanda to expand and create 10 virtual kitchen brands across 2,000 outlets in the APAC region. They have already piloted the project at six targeted countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Thailand, Hong Kong and the Philippines.

In the first phase of its 5-year long partnership, Rebel Foods has gone live with four of its many brands including Faasos, The Biryani Life, Lunchbox and Honest Bowl. Honest Bowl was jointly developed by both the companies. They are looking at not just enhancing existing brands and creating new offerings and brands. The menu of all of these brands will be customised depending on the cultures and countries.

Virtual kitchen

The QSR-format virtual kitchen brands will be run through both company-owned and franchise models. For franchise owners, Rebel Foods will enable them with its tech-based culinary expertise, efficient SOPs and ready-to-deploy brands. And Foodpanda is training the staff of the restaurant partners and cloud kitchen operators to plug-and-play the virtual brands into their current operations and grow additional revenue streams, at little to no start-up costs

Pedram Assadi, COO, Foodpanda said, “This is the largest virtual brand partnership globally. In the past six, orders from Rebel Foods’ brands on foodpanda app on average grew 40 per cent month-on-month. As of today, we are live with more than 200 outlets across the six markets.

While Rebel Foods recently turned a unicorn, Foodpanda’s run in India hasn’t been quite lucrative. The companies told BusinessLine, that they won’t be looking at setting up any of these outlets in India, which means Foodpanda doesn’t plan to re-enter the India market. Its operations in the country was acquired by OLA.

Kallol Banerjee, Co-founder, Rebel Foods said, “The next generation of businesses are essentially disruptors on the internet. For Foodpanda and Rebel Foods teams, who are more on the supply side and kitchen side respectively---this is where it all comes together. Just like brands such as Nike which is getting manufactured at one place and then retailed by a Walmart, food too will see a similar trend, wherein brand, manufacturing, distribution of food will no longer be in the same place.

Globally, food panda operates in more than 400 cities across 12 markets in Asia - Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Pakistan, Taiwan, Philippines, Bangladesh, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Japan. It is a subsidiary of German food delivery company Delivery Hero.