Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the restaurant industry has been worst-hit. The National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) represents over 500,000 restaurants across the globe, and more than
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the restaurant industry has been worst-hit. The National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) represents over 500,000 restaurants across the globe, and more than 20 lakh people are directly employed in the restaurant industry may be rendered jobless
“When the lockdown was announced, the restaurant industry was one of the worst-hit. A lot of chefs, waiters, and small businesses lost their job. Around 25 percent of restaurants listed on Zomato shut down during the lockdown itself, while 20-25 percent of dine-in restaurants were never going to start again even after the lockdowns were lifted,” Gaurav Padiyar, Founder and CEO of Bingage, tells in an interview.
As per RedSeer Management Consulting, which is a cloud kitchen and online ordering market is projected to become a $2 billion industry in India by 2024, up from $400 million in 2019. And, as per a Gartner report, the overall customer management software (CRM) market in India stands at $462.7 million, with an annual growth rate of 20.5 percent.
“The hardest time for my team was between January 2016 and October 2017. I lost lakhs of rupees in this business. Many people advised me to shut down the business and take up a marketing job. However, I kept going,” Gaurav shares.
“In January 2016, I called up the owner of Hotel Sensation, Amit Banke. I explained the benefits of Bingage app to him. He bought the idea and I managed to sell out 500 memberships (Rs 2,500 each) from his hotel. Then more contracts followed — Ozone Restaurants, Jal Restaurants, Regenta Resorts — all from Indore. We managed to break-even,” founder adds.
“Until January 2020, Bingage achieved a 200 percent growth year on year. However, 200 percent isn’t a parameter because, in the second year of any business, you obviously do double than your previous year. So we focussed on some unique strategies and built strong domain expertise,” Gaurav explains.
“It was due to the support from my team that we managed to keep new sales growth by 20 percent in May 2020 through retail and supermarkets. By July, we had reached 60 percent of the sales revenue of February 2020,” he says.
