eat.fit no flash in the pan as Ankit Nagori gets success menu right

A failed venture, a tryst with Flipkart, and a Covid blow, the Cure.fit co-founder is hungry for more

In 2009, when Flipkart in Bengaluru had sparked off a debate in the start-up space, a young Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) graduate in Gurugram was busy firefighting — he had burnt his fingers with his entrepreneurial debut. His social network YouthPad in Gurugram folded up due to dearth of talent, zero investors, and low internet adoption.

The fresh-faced engineering graduate cold-called India’s hottest e-commerce start-up at the New Delhi World Book Fair in 2010.

“Flipkart was then a small company, but it was one of the largest start-ups in the country,” recalls Ankit Nagori, then 24, who had completed his engineering from IIT-Guwahati in 2007. “Any entrepreneur would have loved to become something like Flipkart, even at that small scale.”

A young resource at Flipkart, he had the task of building the non-books category at the company. The team started with music and games. By the time that category was launched, it realised that customers were hungry for more categories. By the end of 2010, the electronics category, including mobile phones and laptops, was added to Flipkart. By then, Nagori had spent over six years at Flipkart, which had morphed into an e-commerce giant.

“In 2016, I realised my entrepreneurial journey was still inchoate and that I had to start somewhere. Also, Flipkart had given me the springboard for branching out. I had learnt how to start and run a company,” reminisces Nagori.

Nagori and Mukesh Bansal came together to form a hybrid fitness platform called Cure.fit in 2016, given their love for fitness and sports. Although the initial ride was smooth, the business had several pivots. They realised their original plan of bringing together health providers and fitness services providers was a big ask.

As the company raised $110 million in a Series D2 funding round led by Temasek in March 2020, little did the founders know how the year would play out. The ensuing pandemic, followed by radical lockdown measures to rein in the spread of the coronavirus, hit business hard. The company had to fire hundreds of employees and scale down its eat.fit business by 70 per cent, even as home ordering starved for customers.

The pandemic also made the founders realise that the unit economics of food and gyms is different. In October 2020, co-founders Bansal and Nagori decided to carve out eat.fit as an entity separate from Cure.fit. With Nagori running the show at eat.fit, there were rumours that the founders had parted ways, which Nagori vehemently denied.

Nagori is now busy expanding his Cloud kitchen venture eat.fit and gunning for 100 Cloud kitchens in 10 cities in the next five years.

The company has also rebranded eat.fit as a multi-category brand that offers hygienic food (low trans fat and sugar) in several categories, such as thalis, biryanis, and burgers, apart from healthy food options like signature salads through its Cloud kitchens.

According to reports, the market size of Cloud kitchens is expected to reach $1.05 billion in two years. “In the three years preceding Covid, spin-off Cloud kitchens served a new niche that was being explored by brick-and-mortar restaurants and fast food/quick service restaurants. With Covid having tempered revenue expectations, the appetite for Cloud kitchens only grew. The foodtech space will grow 6x in terms of volume and interest. Feeding the curiosity of start-ups looking to replace traditional business models with a more sustainable and scalable one, every Cloud kitchen has a silver lining,” says brand strategist Harish Bijoor.

With players such Amazon, Swiggy, and Zomato vying for a slice, they’ll also need supply and technology-led players to fulfil the growing orders. eat.fit, which has a technology backbone running from procurement and cooking to order despatch, is confident about its success recipe.

“Technology also helps us forecast the next day’s orders, on the basis of which raw materials are procured,” says Nagori. The platform’s orders — which had slipped to 10 per cent last year — have trebled. It expects 70 per cent pre-pandemic order levels in the next 12-18 months. It currently has 15 Cloud kitchens and plans to have five more by the end of 2021.

Nagori, in the process of sourcing ingredients to get the eat.fit success menu right, takes no shortcuts. If you have a finger in the pie, he says, that pie better be the best in the business.

Apart from healthy and nutritious food, eat.fit also has plans to come up with separate labels to cater to smaller categories, such as desserts, and juices. After hiving off the food business, the company will also raise funds separately for eat.fit.

After food, cricket is Nagori’s consuming passion. He is also helming a non-governmental organisation called Simply Sport Foundation, which supports athletes who have the talent, but don’t have the resources.