NEW DELHI: Food and beverages retail company Lite Bite Foods, which operates restaurant brands such as Punjab Grill, TRES, The Artful Baker, Zambar and Asia Seven Express besides others is foraying into cloud kitchens and will roll out 36 kitchens across five cities in the next three years.
Director Rohit Aggarwal said the current scenario is expected to give a boost to online food deliveries going forward and the company is targeting a turnover of Rs 100 crore from cloud kitchens in the next three years.
Aggarwal said the first cloud kitchens from the company will open in Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida followed by other cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru. The company is starting with an investment of Rs 25 crore in the segment.
“We have identified pockets and we can easily do about 8-10 kitchens in Delhi NCR. This will be followed by Mumbai and then Bengaluru because we already have a good presence in these cities and have the supporting infrastructure,” he added.
The first kitchen is expected to go live in August 2020. Other locations will also include Pune and Hyderabad.
Lite Bite Foods will also launch its own food app under the brand name ‘FOOGO’ which will allow customers to browse and order food from all the restaurants under the company’s portfolio. Customers will also have the choice to place an order via platforms like Zomato, Swiggy, Scootsy and others.
Brands such as Punjab Grill, Zambar and the QSR brands will be serviced from the cloud kitchens and the company will also focus on three popular home delivery categories of food- biryani, rolls and parathas, and meals in a bowl through new brands.
The company’s restaurants in malls are shut currently and business in standalone outlets is in low single digits. “But our delivery business has picked up and is getting better everyday,” Aggarwal said.
The company said its kitchens will operate on a ‘hub and spoke’ model and will follow a 100% contactless preparation methodology, devised during COVID 19, wherein all the staff members of the central kitchen facility will never come into direct contact with the ingredients that go into the dishes with bare hands. All food containers and packaging material will be sanitised before packing and dispatching, it added.
