Get your popcorn.🍿
🔢 Pop! Crunch. Crunch. Some numbers. An annual skyrocketing growth of 25 to 30 percent! Google and BCG have predicted that India’s online food industry will touch base the $8B mark by 2022, up from $4 billion. The reach of food tech aggregators increased by six times between 2017-2019. And if statistics are anything to go by, even the time spent exploring and ordering food online has almost doubled from 32 minutes in 2017 to 72 minutes a month in 2019.
🚀 Zomato’s Juicy INR 8,250 crore IPO. Zomato just cannot put a lid on how pandemic led to a surge in online food ordering in India. The $1.1B offerings would be India’s most enticing IPO assortment this year, surpassing Indian Railway Finance Corp.’s $649M offerings in January.
💰 Slurp! Swiggy’s $800M fund-raise. At a $4.9B evaluation. The long-term goal is to serve 500 million users in the next 10-15 years, which competes with Zomato, Amazon and specifically points to the Chinese food giant Meituan (which had 500 million transacting users last year & is valued at over $100B).
🍳 Home Cooking. Happy Food Technologies, a Bengaluru-based food-tech start-up saw an opportunity and need for ‘ghar ka khaana.’ They created a network of home chefs and brought them onto a digital marketplace called ‘MyKhaana.’
🥤 Pepsi Blue is hitting the shelves. Nike’s Blees Blue campaign was not the only one showing support. The blue-hued drink was launched strategically in India during the Cricket World Cup 2003, as a gesture of support to the country’s cricket team. But sadly, the cool drink was pulled back from the shelves (duh!). Let’s wait and watch, if we can get hold of this odd-flavored offshoot.
🧐 We can already see how technology is revolutionizing human life and how the recent pandemic changed the way we look at Tech. But we all need to agree that this has added some really new and exciting flavors to the Food industry with some finger-lickin’ new tech.
✋ Pay-with-your-palm. Yes, this is already an option at Amazon! Without cash, without a card, without transfers, and even without a cell phone, the Amazon One system reads your hand so you can pay for your purchases, see how it works. At present, there are two Amazon Go stores in Seattle that offer these services.
🛵 Driverless Pizza. Pepperoni! The pizza giant’s 1980s mascot, ‘Noid’ is back on the road to disrupt delivery times. But the bandit is no longer going after Domino’s drivers, Instead, now he’s going after their autonomous vehicles.
🤖 Bear Robotics’ ServiBot. The Houston Rockets & Toyota Center in partnership with Levy Restaurants teamed up with Bear Robotics to launch the first-ever robot-assisted food and beverage service at a stadium or arena. Annddd, innovation is everywhere!
⏳ Under 30 minutes delivery. Woohoo! Do you need anything better? Spain’s Glovo just raised $528M (€450 million) to double down on its strategy of super fast delivery. It wants to become the market leader in 20 European nations in the “q-commerce” (quick commerce) industry.
Finally,
🗑️ Wasting Food is NOT cool. Some 931M tons of food went to waste in 2019. Individual households were responsible for more than half of that, with the rest coming from retailers and the foodservice industry.
Now, let’s dig in… 🍽️
Getting married has its perks & drawbacks. But Missouri took it to a whole new level with its state tax. It imposed a “bachelor tax” of a dollar a year – on single men aged 21 to 50.
Is the price of freedom a dollar every year?
