By Connecting Food With Technology, This Woman Entrepreneur Made it to The Entrepreneur India's Women to Watch For Class of 2019
With FreshMenu, Rashmi Daga is determined to bring the best of food on customer's table
By Punita Sabharwal •
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Rashmi Daga laid the foundation of one of the most exciting food tech companies- FreshMenu in September 2014. Armed with a rich experience in spearheading and managing several start-ups and diverse businesses, she wanted to bring the best of food on customer's table. Aimed at rescuing food- seekers from mundane meals, FreshMenu is on a constant quest to whip-up interesting food options in the kitchens spread out across the city that deliver freshly cooked food to the doorsteps of its customers.
Rather than setting up a restaurant, Rashmi Daga set up the food delivery platform under the FeshMenu umbrella for people to order. As per Daga, "The size of the food sector is huge, which attracted me plus a lot was changing around food and delivery food was taking shape around the globe." Ordering became the big change rather eating out was. She went ahead with her first prototype with a home kitchen making it the proof of concept. People got excited for such food to come home and were willing to pay. The 1700 strong army of Freshmenu employees deliver to three cities of Gurgaon, Mumbai and Bangalore right now with 38 cloud kitchens. It currently serves half a million orders monthly generating revenue of 150 crore. "We have been very focused on building a retail brand for consumers. Institutional side is something we would love to look at in the future. Going forward, we would like to go the top ten cities in India like Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata," shares Daga.
At kitchen level the startup is making money, but at the corporate level they expect to achieve profitability in next 12 months. The venture so far has raised close to 160 crore. In the words of Daga, "Operating cloud kitchens is a different business altogether. This business needs lot of execution. Translating ideas into reality has been a hard part. Taste is such a subjective thing." For her, being fast, and not regretting mistakes has been the key to success. Things are dynamic, speed and agility helped her move fast.
(This article appears in the March-April 2019 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, click here. You can buy our tablet version from Magzter.com. To visit our Archives, click here.)
