How Ankit Nagori is finding the right ingredients for Eat.Fit to succeed

A failed venture, a tryst at Flipkart and the blow of the pandemic all provided learnings to the IIT grad, who is now well on his way to make his enterprise a success story

In 2009, when everyone was talking about Flipkart in Bengaluru, the new startup on the block that was doing a revenue of Rs 1 crore a month, a young IIT graduate was on the verge of shutting down his social media marketing platform called YouthPad in Gurgaon. 

After running his first venture YouthPad for two years (2008-2010), Ankit Nagori decided to shut down due to the paucity of talent, no investors, and low internet adoption. “That’s when I realised the best thing then was to join a young startup,” says Nagori, who reached out to Flipkart cofounder Binny Bansal and joined the flourishing company in 2010. 

A young resource at Flipkart, he had the task of building the non-books category at the company. Hence, the team started with music and games, and by the time that category was launched, they realised that customers were hungry for many categories. By the end of 2010, the electronics category, including phones and laptops, was added to Flipkart. By then, Nagori had spent over six years at Flipkart, which had become a mega ecommerce giant.

“In 2016, I realised my entrepreneurial journey was still incomplete and I had to restart at some point. Also, Flipkart had given me the learning platform on how to start and run a company,” reminiscences Nagori. There has been no looking back since then.

Nagori and Mukesh Bansal came together to form Cure.Fit in 2016, something that was close to their heart, as both are health and sports enthusiasts. Though the initial ride was smooth, the business had several pivots as they realised that their original plan of bringing together health providers and fitness services provider wasn't easy.

As the company raised $110 million in a Series D2 funding  round led by Temasek in March of 2020, little did the founders know how the year would pan out. The ensuing breakout of the pandemic, followed by drastic lockdown measures, hit its business hard as they had to shut completely. The company had to fire hundreds of employees and scale down its Eat.Fit business by 70 per cent as home ordering died down. 

The pandemic also made the founders realise that the unit economics of food and gyms are different and in October of 2020 co-founders Mukesh Bansal and Nagori decided to make Eat.fit a separate entity from Cure.Fit. With Nagori running the show at Eat.Fit there were rumours that the founders have parted ways, which he denied.

After cricket, it is food that Nagori is extremely passionate about. At present, he is busy expanding his cloud kitchen venture Eat.Fit, and is aiming to have 100 cloud kitchens in 10 cities in the next five years.

The company has also rebranded Eat.Fit as a multicategory brand that offers clean food (low transfat and sugar) in several categories such as thalis, biryani and burgers, apart from healthy food options like signature salads through its cloud kitchens. 

With players such Amazon, Swiggy and Zomato getting deeper into cloud kitchens, they’ll need supply and technology led players to fulfill the growing orders. Eat.Fit which has a technology backbone running from procurement, to cooking to dispatch of orders, is confident to make a mark here. “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 gone down to 10 per cent last year have tripled now and it expects a 70 per cent pre-pandemic order level in the next 12-18 months. They currently have 15 cloud kitchens running and plan to have five more coming up by the end of 2021.

Nagori, who is in the process of making Eat.Fit a success story, believes if you have to win you have to create  a product which is the best in the market in that category. 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 the hiving off of the food business, the company will also raise funds separately for Eat.Fit.

As for his other passion cricket, Nagori is running an NGO Simply Sport Foundation which supports athletes who don't have resources but talent to make a mark. 

According to reports, the market size of cloud kitchens is expected to reach $1.05 billion in two years. “The cloud kitchen was a niche being explored by restaurants and QSRs in the three years pre-Covid. Covid nudged this onto the fast track. There would be a cascade of six times in terms of volume and interest in the immediate future. Every cloud kitchen has a silver lining,” says brand specialist Harish Bijoor.