Swiggy to make an investment of Rs 75 cr to expand its cloud kitchens

Swiggy is planning to invest Rs 75 crore to add more cloud kitchens in the next six months. Till now, the food delivery major has invested Rs 175 crore over a period of two years to open more than 1,000 cloud kitchens across 14 cities for its restaurant partners through its ‘Swiggy Access’ initiative.

Swiggy’s expansion will largely be in 14-15 additional smaller towns and cities like Guwahati, Tirupur, and Surat. Swiggy Access enables restaurant partners to expand to more locations both within their city and across new cities through cloud kitchens.

Vishal Bhatia, CEO, New Supply, Swiggy, said, “Swiggy Access has helped grow restaurant businesses, deliver unmatched customer experience and created employment opportunities in metros as well as Tier II and III cities.”

“Over the last two years, Swiggy has invested over Rs 175 crores towards setting up and running these kitchens. This success has encouraged us to invest an additional Rs 75 crore to bring more partner cloud kitchens in 12 new cities by March 2020,” he added.

The company has completed more than half a billion orders as of now. At present, Swiggy is operating in over 500 cities across India. It has on-boarded around 1,47,000 restaurants and has more than 2.1 lakh active delivery partners.

Also Read: How You Can Cook The Recipe Of Your Success In A Cloud Kitchen

Through its cloud kitchen initiatives, Swiggy has created more than 8,000 direct and indirect jobs in the restaurant industry over the last two years. The food delivery major is set to add another 7,000 direct and indirect jobs in the restaurant industry in the next six months.

Cloud Kitchen: An Evolving Market

The cloud kitchens are the new game-changers in the market. According to industry estimates, the daily online order volume of food has increased to 15 lakh per day since September 2018, while it was just 3.7 lakh in the same month previous year. The phenomenal growth of online food delivery market has also had a direct impact on the growth of cloud kitchens in India. 

As per the Statista Online Food Delivery report for India, revenue in the online food delivery segment is expected to cross $7 billion in 2019. Food delivery majors like Swiggy and Zomato are constantly targeting to scale up, and cloud kitchens provide the ideal opportunity to do just that.

Bhatia stated, “With the massive growth in online food ordering over the last 2-3 years, India has leapfrogged the widespread in-restaurant dining culture that was prevalent in many international markets. Swiggy has always maintained that cloud kitchens will be the future of food delivery.”

“Very soon, India will have the second-highest number of cloud kitchens in the world, only next to China,” he further added.

Also Read: Cloud Kitchens – F&B Sector Cooks up a New Recipe to Beat High Rental Costs