Swiggy to invest Rs 75 crore for cloud kitchens by March 2020

Food delivery platform Swiggy said on Wednesday that it now has over 1,000 cloud kitchens for its restaurant partners through its Swiggy Access initiative within two years since its launch. This, they claim, makes Swiggy the largest enabler of this model for restaurants in the country. 

Swiggy Access, which provides kitchen space for restaurants to prepare food solely for delivery, is now available across 14 cities occupying over 1 million square feet of space. 

Swiggy, which spent over Rs 175 crore towards setting up and running these kitchens in the last two years, now plans to infuse an additional Rs 75 crore to bring more partner cloud kitchens in 12 new cities by March 2020.

“Swiggy has always maintained that cloud kitchens will be the future of food delivery,” said Vishal Bhatia, CEO of New Supply at Swiggy. “Very soon, India will have the second-highest number of cloud kitchens in the world, only next to China.”

Swiggy Access allows restaurants to expand beyond their home turf without having to invest heavily in real estate infrastructure and labor.

This comes at a time when Uber’s Travis Kalanick, has started building an India team for its food delivery business called CloudKitchens, according to an Economic Times report. Just recently, Kalanick’s company City Storage Systems picked up a stake in cloud kitchen firm Rebel Foods, which runs several food delivery brands including Faasos and Behrouz Biryani.