Sanjeev Kapoor Planing To Open His Own Online Food Start-up

Celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor of Khana Khazana fame will take on food startups Zomato and Foodpanda by launching his own mobile-first food startup. He says there is enough untapped potential in the online food market that has recently been privy to frantic fund infusion by investors.

Kapoor, a veteran food influencer in the country, says his food startup will focus on predicting people's tastes and push name of restaurants and food varieties accordingly. "We have been collecting data till now and will launch the company in Mumbai in the next six months. All I can say is that it will be a very integrated approach and will also include transactions," he said. He did not give any more details.

Noting the need to stepping closer to the customer, big food startups such as Zomato and Foodpanda have been trying hard to move beyond restaurant reviews. On Tuesday, Zomato acquired MaplePOS, a Delhi-based startup that will help it expand into online orders, payments and table reservations from just restaurant reviews. Two days later, Rocket Internet-backed Foodpanda launched its food delivery services. "By extending our services from the online stage of ordering to actual delivery at the consumer's doorstep, we aim to augment our customers' engagement with Foodpanda and deliver to a larger set of partners," said Saurabh Kocchar, CEO with Foodpanda.

"At the end of the day, you need to have transactions. How long will you run by just listing restaurants," says Kapoor. He is betting on his fame as the host of Asia's longest running cook show, a best-selling author and a shrewd businessman, who has built a sizeable business empire around food.

"I am not bothered about seed funding," says Kapoor, who runs 70 restaurants across India and the Middle East

and has set up Wonderchef, a company that sells premium kitchen products from cookware to appliances. "Currently, the bigger food startups are talking about around 1,000 orders per day. In comparison, Dominos does around 60,000. That's the kind of potential I am talking about," he says.