Dineout is bringing together the restaurants working with its product inResto
Amazon is collectively bringing in the vendors it works with for its B2B side
Amazon is looking to launch its food delivery services in December
Almost one month ahead of Amazon’s expected food delivery launch, the company has tied up with restaurant reservation platform Dineout to enable inventory management for restaurants.
Talking to Inc42, Dineout cofounder Ankit Mehrotra explained that the companies have come together to create a marketplace of restaurants and vendors. While Dineout is bringing together the restaurants working with its product inResto, Amazon is collectively bringing in the vendors it works with for its B2B side.
Recently, Dineout integrated CRM (existing inResto, which Dineout acquired in 2015) with Torqus POS (acquired by Dineout in 2018) to provide an end-to-end solution for customer management and digital payments tracking. It helped restaurateurs to pinpoint the ordering patterns of customers to run customised loyalty programmes as well as collect real-time feedback from diners.
Amazon-Dineout: How Does The Integration Work?
The idea here is to enable restaurants to manage their end-to-end inventory and raw material needs at one place, instead of tying up with several vendors for different requirements. The integration with Amazon India will help restaurants directly order supply with just a click within the inResto dashboard, along with the choice of the best vendors at competitive prices.
The companies added that the integration becomes more significant for cloud kitchens, who work out of smaller spaces and can only store two to three days of stock.
InResto platform users will be directed to a dashboard that will allow them to access raw material both for food and non-food items like packaging and cutlery, grocery, beverages & dairy, kitchen supplies, office improvement, frozen and canned products and more, listed on Amazon For Business website in India.
The co-curated marketplace will help restaurants choose quality brands at the best price and have full control over the cost of goods sold, thus improving profitability.
Further, Amazon is also offering its no-cost EMI facility to help restaurants spread their inventory expenses over longer timelines vs. their standard credit period of 10-14 days.
Currently, Dineout has close to 8K restaurants using inResto, all of which were upgraded to inResto 2.0. However, the companies were running a pilot of the co-created marketplace since August 2019, where only 100 restaurants were exploring the integration.
Dineout: Leveraging B2B And B2C Foodtech Industry
Founded in 2012 by Ankit Mehrotra, Vivek Kapoor, Nikhil Bakshi and Sahil Jain, Dineout claims to currently serve more than 20 Mn diners across 40K restaurants in 17 cities including Delhi, Mumbai among others. The company was acquired by Times Internet in April 2014.
The company offers multiple B2B and B2C services. This includes Dineout Pay, Gourmet Passport, Torqus POS, InResto etc. Recently, the company launched Dine-in, a digital menu solution with support for variable and dynamic pricing.
Mehrotra had earlier told Inc42 that over the last two years, the company has grown 6x. To continue this trend, Dineout aims for 300% growth this year. It is also aiming to reach 40 Mn diners this year, having launched in nine new Tier 2 cities in the last 12 months.
In terms of the split of B2B and B2C revenue distribution, the balance is tilted in favour of the former, with 60% of the revenue coming from B2B channels. But B2C is growing faster and Mehrotra expects a 60:40 revenue split between B2C and B2B this year.
Amazon Eyeing Foodtech Industry
Reports about Amazon’s entry into the food delivery market in India surfaced earlier this year. The company is preparing to launch the service in December 2019. Amazon will be running the service in a partnership with Prione Business Services, the local arm of VC firm Catamaran Venture.
In an exclusive report in September 2019, Inc42 pointed out that Amazon is in advanced discussions with restaurants to fix commission and delivery fees. The company will be charging a 6% to 10% commission when not fulfilling the food delivery and 18% to 22% if the restaurant uses Amazon’s delivery service.
Here, Dineout’s integrations give a larger edge to Amazon, which is trying to fulfill the end-to-end requirements of restaurants and cloud kitchens. Further, this is not the first time brands are trying to fulfill the raw material requirements of restaurants.
Hyperpure was launched by Zomato in August 2018 and is responsible for supplying ingredients such as vegetables, chicken, and other meat to the partner restaurants. Through this, the company uses an end-to-end technology-driven platform for the food value chain to ensure that high-quality ingredients reach the kitchens.
The Indian food services industry has an estimated market size of INR 4.23 Lakh Cr 19 and this is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9% to reach INR 6 Lakh Cr over the next five years. According to an analysis by Deloitte, the Indian online food delivery market, for both aggregators and cloud kitchen, is expected to be an opportunity worth over $5 Bn by the end of the year 2023.
