The Food Tech wave in India - is it for real?

Over the last few months, the term "Food-Tech" has been in the news because of the extensive venture capital funding activity in the space. The larger players in this space are Foodpanda (which has acquired both Justeat and Tastykhana), Tinyowl, Swiggy, Freshmenu, Roadrunnr and of course Zomato. There are several smaller players such as Yumist, Holachef, Spoonjoy, Dineout, Delyver, Opinio, Limetray, Pickingo, Grab, Jomaange etc., who have all raised some sort of funding.
I have been grappling with food tech in the same manner brick & mortar retailers have been grappling with e-commerce. First off, calling these companies "Food-Tech" seems very misplaced to me - there is nothing these folks are doing with respect to technology related to food. All they are doing is enabling consumers to order food/transact with a restaurant.

They are really providing a computer/mobile device channel for consumers to do 4 things in a loop - search for info on food joints, transact with them (order food for delivery, book a table etc.), handle logistics (i.e. deliver the food) in some cases and provide feedback for everyone else to search better. For convenience and to go with the flow, I am also going to use the term "Food Tech" to refer to these companies, but in the above context.

I do believe that tech & "e" in the food space is different from other segments because of the following reasons. I will explain each of these reasons in detail in separate posts. I will also try and evaluate each of the companies in this space and provide my perspective on their business models.

1) This is a segment where the entire transaction needs to be completed within a very short time frame - i.e. the food needs to be delivered to the customer within 30-45 minutes. This makes it virtually impossible to achieve efficiency in logistics since orders cannot be easily clubbed based on just the delivery location as both the source and the destination are variables. I am not sure how technology (other than something like drones) can really make a significant difference to this. Having a Uber style model where you have delivery boys on standby in the local locations to go the restaurant, pick up the food and deliver it, seems unsustainable because of the dependencies involved with the restaurant and the concern mentioned in point 2 below. If companies like Roadrunnr, Swiggy are able to crack this, I expect them to be more like a on-demand delivery staffing firm with a lot of staff in every local area. Restaurants would love this as they don't need to employ delivery staff, buy bikes, maintain them etc. The trouble will be with the economics - the cost of delivery is estimated to be upwards of Rs. 80-100 per order, when you average it out over a week. This means that the delivery companies will need to charge restaurants over 25% of the bill value as their fees for the service for the model to make economic sense.

I will write a separate post evaluating the business model of the specific companies mentioned above. The trouble is that this becomes more a staffing business (like what a Group4 is to the security space) and managing labour on the ground will not be easy.

2) The orders are clustered in short time blocks - Lunch & dinner times account for 90% of a restaurant's business and within this the window for orders is about 90 minutes. Majority of customers eat lunch and dinner around the same time - in a block of about 90 minutes. This makes staffing and the associated logistics of delivery impossible to manage in an efficient manner. For e.g. if a restaurant has 4 delivery boys, it will be great if they receive lunch orders sequentially between 12 noon and 330 PM. The problem is that the orders come in a bell curve pattern - 10% of order between 12 and 1 PM, 80% of order between 1 and 2 PM and the remaining 10% post 2 PM. The restaurant needs only 1 delivery boy between 12 and 1 PM and post 2 PM to deliver the food promptly. But they would love to have 10+ delivery boys between 1 and 2 PM. This problem cannot be solved using fancy tech - whatever analytics, clustering you do, the only real solution is to have more staff available between 1 and 2 PM.  

3) The product has a very short shelf-life - therefore cannot be stored in a ware-house and shipped upon receiving the order like with a product such as a phone or a digital camera. This again makes the opportunity to use central warehouses, logistics planning, optimisation etc. ineffective.

4) The product needs to be prepared and packed only upon order - cannot be shipped right away. The moment of truth in food retail is at the retail unit. This means that the restaurant needs a minimum of 10-15 minutes to keep the product in a manner that is ready to be shipped. Companies like Freshmenu have cut down this 10-15 minute period by having a small fixed menu everyday, allowing them to prepare and pack in advance and upon receiving an order, simply handle the delivery process.

In summary, I believe that food-tech companies will be better off focusing on static restaurant activities like information services and pure technology related components such as order taking (with payment). Handling logistics at the last mile is going to involve dealing with ground level and labour management issues.