Kolkata-based intercity cooked food delivery startup, tastes2plate.com, is close to securing INR 30-40 crore in Series A venture funding. The company aims to fuel exponential growth in the online food delivery market, which holds the potential to reach $3-5 billion within the next few years, according to an official statement.
Led by IT professional Gyan Srivastava, the bootstrapped startup invested over three years to stabilize its business model through extensive innovation in packaging and logistics.
This allowed the company to become the lowest-cost player in the industry, he said.
“We are very close to raising INR 30-40 crore in Series A funding,” said Srivastava, CEO of tastes2plate (T2P) owned by Charabuni Services.
The company aims to utilize the funds primarily for capacity building in marketing, information technology, and logistics infrastructure, as stated by him.
“The funding will help us achieve 30-40 per cent month-on-month growth in the number of deliveries compared to our current volume.
“While the total online food delivery business is $19.6 billion with a CAGR of 20 per cent, the intercity delivery segment is still nascent but growing exponentially. Currently, we average over 35,000 deliveries per month,” Srivastava said.
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Picked food is packed from one city and shipped to another, ensuring freshness upon delivery within 12 to 24 hours, as explained by the official.
Regarding competition, Srivastava claimed, “Currently, one other app operates in this domain, but another dominant online food delivery app is not consistently active in the market. We are the only company focused purely on intercity food delivery.”
He asserted that tastes2plate, currently operational in approximately 20 major cities, provides customers with the most economical overall food delivery cost.
“This was possible only through innovative packaging that meets Indian Institute of Packaging standards,” Srivastava stated.
On the T2P platform, customers typically pay an average of INR 120 per kilogram, plus packaging, for orders from participating restaurants. For customized deliveries, the rate is INR 210 per kilogram, inclusive of packaging costs.
Interestingly, there is also a growing demand for delivering home-cooked food to loved ones in other cities, he noted.
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“Apart from the increasing trend of ordering delicacies from other cities, trial deliveries of home-cooked food for relatives and friends have seen good traction. This is why we are launching this service as a full-fledged offering,” Srivastava said.
Currently, it is offering its services in cities such as Kolkata, Patna, Lucknow, Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Jaipur, Amritsar, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kochi and Goa.
The company’s plan is to expand its service to Ahmedabad, Chennai, Kanpur, Ludhiana, and Guwahati within the next 30 to 45 days.