Health and fitness startup Cure.fit will hive off its cloud kitchen vertical Eat.fit to work as a separate entity, the company statement said, claiming that the “separation will help it to fulfil the surge in demand”.
The move comes at a time when Cure.fit hasn’t been prioritising its food business. In August, it had downscaled the quick-service restaurants (QSRs) vertical significantly across the country in the wake of poor demand. It was operational in 14 cities before March-April but the service is now available in Bengaluru and Hyderabad only.
“Making Eat.fit a separate entity will allow us to dedicate more time and resources in an efficient manner to make the business grow and deliver value to our consumers, and we hope that doing so can help us deepen our impact in the cloud kitchens and food delivery category in India,” said Mukesh Bansal, founder of Cure.fit, in a press statement.
Eat.fit will now be run by an independent team and it will continue to sell on the Cure.fit platform and online ordering platforms. Eat.fit currently operates across 15 kitchens in the two cities it is in and has served over 1.5 million users to date. The decision to hive off its food business could be the aftershock of the pandemic as well as it had witnessed no business during April-May due to the nation-wide lockdown.
At its peak, Eat.fit used to run over 45 cloud kitchens and process over 50,000 orders a day. According to Entrackr’s sources, the company’s current volume is at less than 40% of its pre-Covid volume.
While the company’s core business is centred around fitness, Eat.fit played a pivotal role in making users aware of the platform and its concept of holistic fitness.
The foremost challenge for Eat.fit’s new team is to achieve the pre-Covid scale. The pandemic has created uncertainty around the prospects of Cure.fit’s physical fitness centres and it will certainly have an impact on its bottom and top lines in the current fiscal.
Besides food, the company had also entered the grocery segment in February and recently expanded into the ready-to-eat segment. The company is now strengthening its packaged food business to revive the food business hurt badly by the pandemic.
