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Ordering food in Mumbai becomes easier with the launch of JustEat.in
If ideas ruled the world, Ritesh Dwivedy sure had one. This IIT pass-out and founder & the CEO of Hungry Zone, decided to quit his posh and heftily paid job in an MNC to give his dream a shape.
Knowing the inconvenience caused to the people who had to rely on eating outside, Ritesh started an online ordering and restaurant reservation service. It was particularly aimed at those who had to leave work-place to go restaurant hunting during lunch hours.
Ritesh started Hungryzone.com, an online food ordering and table booking platform, by leveraging on his knowledge of the IT to create an advanced networking that would ease the tedious task of visiting a restaurant.
Founded in July 2006 and headquartered in Bangalore, Hungry Zone enabled its customers to place online home delivery orders from over 650 restaurants serving over 40 different cuisines.
The company which started with one staff member now boasts of a well-established staff of 30-members, busy cracking technical impediments and supplying solutions to expedite the delivery of the incoming and outgoing orders.
Last December called for a major development in the company when it bagged the much coveted deal with Just-Eat, the UK’s largest online takeaway ordering service.
Just-Eat acquired a majority shareholding in the company and would invest $5-10 million over the next three years into this joint venture. This deal was the first major investment of its kind where a European e-commerce invested in India and would provide a strong foundation for the joint venture to expand into all Indian metros starting with Mumbai and Delhi shortly.
JustEat.in was the newly-formed company after Just-Eat Group bought 60% stake in Hungryzone.com last year.
Says Ritesh, “A small company like us can leverage on the brand name. This also signifies the interest of JustEat Group in catering to the foodies across India.”
He added, “Just-Eat is the leading global player in online food ordering, so the combination of Just-Eat’s best practices, with our strong local knowledge and technical prowess derived from 4 years of operations in India, will drive growth for many years to come. Our proven business model and 2,00,000 loyal customers will only grow with our new partners thereby helping us expand our footprint in other major cities.”
The JV announced its operations on March 1, in Mumbai. Alongside, the Bangalore base would also be revamped to adopt its new name and work-culture.
Mumbai was the obvious choice for being 3-4 times bigger in size, growing disposable income with the people and congested traffic situation which made eating out a nightmare for the people.
“It is sure to delight all the foodies in Mumbai, as the pain of finding a wide variety of quality restaurants, placing an order and sharing experiences on the same can now be done on a single robust platform in a matter of few clicks. Mumbai was easily our first choice given the kind of hectic life people lead and the frequency of eating out. It is a land of dreams and has thereby attracted a significant number of immigrants who are always on the lookout for good food. Our innovative business model, strong local knowledge and technical prowess will definitely help us reach out to all the food lovers in the city,” said Ritesh.
One marketing tip that the new venture Just-Eat.in sought to adopt from Just-Eat.com was to focus on an aggressive expansion strategy. “ The tie-up boosts our confidence to contemplate expansion in geographies outside India, obviously our current attention being Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi,” Ritesh explained.
David Buttress, managing director of Just-Eat, said, “The acquisition of a controlling interest in JustEat.in marked the first step of Just-Eat’s expansion into Asia and we are very excited to work with such an innovative team in different markets of India as the company has a deep understanding of the food preferences of each market. This move to expand our business to Mumbai is the first step we are taking towards being present in all the metropolitan and metropolis in India. The synergy between Just-Eat.com and Just-Eat.in will bring together new ideas, to ensure a professional service to cater rich and exotic cuisines to its customers.”
The kind of restaurants the company would approach befall in a wide spectrum, starting with Rs 2 a roti to the ones costing Rs 100 per roti.
The process of transferring orders as adopted by the company included SMS services, manual (telephones), e-mail, GPRS device and other applications where the restaurants did not have enough facilities to log in.
“Developing technology was challenging as during peak hours the rush for orders is greater and the risk of orders being delayed is higher, especially in the case of manual intervention (phones), like heavy traffic flow leading to the jamming of the telephone lines.”
Thus creating an e-commerce was easy but executing it was difficult, shared Ritesh. In the West most of the restaurants were connected with the Internet/ GPRS so the manual intervention was minimum unlike in India.
The revenue model for such business was based on the number of orders the company was able to deliver, which was vaguely around 10% per order.
With today’s hectic lifestyle, when people did not have time to cook or needed to go around finding a place to eat, not knowing much about the restaurant or its menu, could be very frustrating.
On the Just-Eat guide one could find up-to-date restaurant listings with takeaway and delivery service in India, latest offers, user reviews and rating and much more, so that when consumers intended to search for information online, they got it quickly.
The Just-Eat Group had existing operations in the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Canada and now India.
It delivered over 1,00,000 meals a day and had received more than 10m orders since the site was launched. There were currently over 14,000 takeaway restaurants signed up to Just-Eat’s site which used proprietary technology to offer a seamless on-line ordering service. Just-Eat was currently generating over £200m in revenue per year for the restaurant industry and was recently listed in the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index 2010.
