Sagar Kochhar on EatSure’s strategy to win the quick food delivery segment

In a landscape where convenience reigns supreme, Rebel Foods is redefining the food delivery experience with the launch of QuickiES, promising delivery in a mere 15 minutes or it’s free. Spearheading this revolutionary model is Sagar Kochhar, Co-founder & CEO, EatSure, who speaks to Adgully about the inspiration, infrastructure, and vision behind this bold initiative. From leveraging Rebel Foods' decade-long expertise in cloud kitchens and brand aggregation to addressing consumer demands for speed without compromising quality, Kochhar delves into the strategic thinking and operational excellence that underpin QuickiES. This interview explores the innovative approach Rebel Foods is taking to disrupt the quick commerce space, offering insights into the tech investments, partnerships, and long-term vision that are set to reshape the Indian food delivery market.

Are there any specific consumer trends or insights that led you to believe there was a demand for a 15-minute food delivery model?

If you look across industries, whether you look at e-commerce, content play, or the restaurant industry, the underlying tenet of all these disruptions has been convenience. A convenience that consumers experience the moment a new platform or a new player brings in an offering around that, automatically the disruption is bound to happen. In F&B, when the QSRs came in, they added this great flavor of convenience wherein you don't have to wait half an hour for food, but in maybe a few minutes you have that food or going to the next level, wherein food delivery started growing massively. And in line with that, quick commerce or the quick food delivery segment, it’s the same tenet which is to really dial up the convenience aspect when it comes to consuming great food and great brands in delivery.

So, that is the underlying reason why we believe that quick food delivery is or quick commerce is the new reality. We all as users have experienced how it is shaping e-commerce and we firmly believe that a similar thing is bound to happen even in food delivery.

QuickiES is being hailed as a game-changer in food delivery. What inspired Rebel Foods to launch India’s first ‘15-minute Delivery or Free’ guarantee?

At Rebel Foods, our journey of more than a decade now, from the time when we pioneered the cloud kitchen model, to 2016 when we actually brought in the multi brand play, to the year 2019 when we realized that what we have built is not just these brands like Faasos, Behrouz Biryani, Ovenstory Pizza, but actually an operating system which has the power of bringing some great loved local gems and global gems to the customer. What I mean by operating system is this amalgamation of these three elements.

Number one is culinary expertise. The expertise that helps you to identify a great recipe and then scale it up constantly. The second is the entire play, from consumer to the kitchens to the back end to the making of food. Tech is involved in each and every bit of it. And the third element happens to be the supply chain which connects the entire network virtually like a pipe. These three components come together and they make the Rebel operating system. The operating system is so powerful that not just our own brands, but even some local gems, national gems or global brands, like in 2019 we wanted to enter burgers as a category.

We realized that instead of building our own brand from scratch there is a brand like Wendy's which happens to be the second largest US burger brand which has been trying to get into the country since 2016. And they were going through the similar challenges that exist in the physical world. And we partnered with them and we onboarded them onto the network. In a matter of about a year and a half, two years, we scaled them up across to 200 plus locations. And we now today are the master franchisee owners for Wendy's. And likewise, whether it was about scaling up natural ice cream or smooth chocolates or a bad or donut and a list of brands go on. So that was that.

While we are a portfolio brand at Rebel Foods, but fundamentally we are the world's largest Internet restaurant platform. After we had enabled this Rebel operating system in 2021-22, we enabled almost more than 40-45 brands across 400-plus locations in the country, across 70-75 plus cities.

We had a play in more than 5,000 restaurants. We believe that now that we have brought in some great content in different food categories. We had this great ability to also build a distribution plane. And that's where we launched the distribution platform which is called Eat Sure. We didn't want to position yet another food delivery app, but we called it that.

So, while there are multiple aggregators that have been in the country, there are few two or three of them which are now operating while their prime focus is logistics. To pick up a product from point A, deliver at point B. But in our case with the platform play like Eat Sure. And the fact that we control the full stack, we believe that we had an opportunity to go beyond and solve for a lot of broken experiences like being in a food court. One of the key things number one, being insured.

We said one of the key tenets of the platform would be transparency and assurance. We would only serve food which we know is coming from an HACCP certified kitchen. HACCP happens to be the world class standard in the Indian market when it comes to quality safety assurance. So whatever the insurer as a platform will serve, food will only come from these HACCP certified kitchens, the most trusted kitchens or the and likewise the more certified brands. And then also solve for some broken experiences. For example, if few of us want to place an order and somebody might want to have a burger, somebody might want to have a pizza, we might end up placing multiple orders which will reach us at different points in time.

So, with the insured food court what we the proposition that we brought up was to say that we will bring to you multiple trusted restaurants in one single order. And deliver to you without having to go through all this entire experience of different deliveries, different delivery fees, all of that. And so that is how we start building the D2C play. And we saw some great traction with more than 10 million app downloads, 4.4 plus rated app, great retention, great broader market fit. Comes this very year 2024 wherein we realized that now quick commerce happens to be a great opportunity.

And we believe that given the fact that we control the full stack we already have the power of our reach scale distribution. We are really well placed to actually activate this entire proposition of QuickES. When you think about quick commerce specifically and quick food delivery more specifically, to win this entire opportunity, one has to appear as a full stack player.

If you look at whichever operators which I started to get into this play without naming competition, you would see the ones which are really showing up really, you know, to have some good traction. They are controlling the end to end experience, right? From sourcing to making of food, to actually delivering it. Because in this game, if you try doing it by aggregation route, the challenge would be that you're tapping into the same infra of the restaurant industry where that infra is also optimized for giving out the dining experience to users, giving out a regular delivery experience to users.

And now you're piling up your quick play also on top of that. So, it would really not be optimized only for doing a quick delivery. That’s one of the key aspects for someone to win this quick food delivery segment and which is where we realize with each and with the entire full stack play at Rebel is that we have, we have this opportunity to control the full stack and, and bring this offering to the customer, keeping completely the quick food delivery in the, in the center.

Secondly, there was an interesting insight – that if you ask the consumer “You want a burger, do you want any XYZ burger or do you want a Wendy's burger? The customer wants something quick, but would he want to compromise on taste quality or would he want to even risk that, trying something which does not come with the hallmark of assurance, taste quality?

If you could deliver great dishes, great curation coming from much loved brands, from possibly the most trusted ecosystem of running the kitchen operations in a quick way – we believe that is going to be a game changer. And that's where we launched Quickies, which is where we are pushing it to not just deliver any food, but actually “foodgasm”, because that’s the epitome of delivering great quality loved dishes and brands with a promise of 15 minutes, otherwise the food is completely free.

What kind of infrastructure upgrades and technology investments were required to make this happen?

Number one, quick food delivery, or quick commerce, is a full stack play at Rebel Foods. We are already doing it, and have been honing it. We may not have perfected it, but we have come some distance over the last decade.

The full stack play is already there. But in terms of tech infra, there are some interventions and upgrades required. For example, today, and also this entire debate that the food would be made a long time back and all those apprehensions around it. Let me also attack that bit because we're talking about the investments and the tech bit of the intra bit in it.

The way food is being made in kitchens like ours is the fact that we use a lot of data. A lot of intelligence goes in when it comes to how we prepare our kitchens. Different products require different forms of approach. We have so much data because we’re already churning out so much quantity out there.

So, a lot of this thing is already in place for us. Upgrades like to say that, okay, in the evening hour, we would require higher prep or higher readiness for churning out more burgers than biryani. In the night, we would require more biryani. In the morning, we require more breakfast items, how many items in which kitchen do we need to start preparing on time so that it is made freshly? Thus, a lot of data synthesis happens in the backend using artificial intelligence or analytical models and forecasting models that we have.

How do you balance hyper-fast delivery with sustainability and cost-effectiveness?

The core tenet of our existence has been trust and assurance. We will only serve food to customers that we can serve to our own kids and family members. I have 11 years old daughter. She's the biggest brand loyalist of all rebel brands. She would also come back and say that this product is not up to the mark. We work backward from the customer.

For 12-13 years, that's what we have been doing. At the core of it, quality bit on the food, if you look at all our brands, they're the best rated brands in every category.

That's never even going to be a possibility to talk about that. Are we going to compromise on the quality bit of the food? Obviously that's never going to happen in terms of the trust and the assurance bit. Today, all our kitchens in India, about 360, 370 kitchens, are all HACCP certified which are a third party government validation.

Likewise we have this certification that happens in the actual premise where there are audits and validations done by different agencies and they then certify and give you a validation that your kitchen is up to the mark. It's a massive in depth technical quality check.

We are already HACCP certified and that's the reality. These are all trusted restaurants where the food is prepared in these premises. So the trust is given, the assurance is given and also the brands that are going to give out all these products are category brands and their core tenants, core existence has always been about being the most trusted and most loved.

Quality is a strength and that's not a risk for us because that's the power we want to play down. Versus some other competitor who might come in. We'll try to establish the brand equity integrity trust assurance. We have been doing that for over a decade and that's our strength or our core USP.

Are there any partnerships or collaborations in the pipeline to further enhance the QuickiES experience?

Our mission is to strengthen the platform to bring the highest quality, most loved brands in every category, in every neighborhood. That is the North Star for us. Whatever we do at Rebel is working backward from that. It will all be working the customer backwards to say that this is what consumers crave. I wouldn't want to start building a new offering. If it’s ice cream tomorrow, I wouldn’t want to again start building ice cream as a product and then try to build a brand on top of that, that will take its own time.

I would rather get the most sought after product or the brand and then plug it into the network. That has been the approach and very soon you will hear some very interesting names going out there. We are in the final stages of scaling up our network.

How does QuickiES fit into Rebel Foods’ long-term vision for the Indian food delivery market?

Our long-term vision is the same mission statement: working backward from the customer, we will strengthen our platform to bring the highest quality, most loved brands in every category, in every neighborhood.

We believe with Quickies we have a great right to win wherein we can bring those brands to customers in different neighborhoods, delivered in 15 minutes. And if we don't, we give it for free.

We have confidence because we have seen the operational excellence that we had been piloting for the last three months.

The more we are able to do that, the more customer access and insights we will have. That kind of becomes a flywheel: serving great brands to customers, get more brand love, increase their frequency, acquire more users, give us more insights as to what they want more.

We bring more such category content brands onto the network and it becomes the flywheel effect.

A lot depends on how well we execute.