Most people who know us (falafel jee) know we sell hummus (600+ kilograms a month) to cloud kitchens in Bangalore. But few know that hummus is just step one of a much larger plan towards

unfucking food.

A growing share of what people eat now comes from an app, and a lot of it is bad. It is not bad in a “tastes awful” way, but bad in a “you really shouldn’t be having that regularly as a meal every day” way.

Out of curiosity, we tested the “healthy” items on delivery apps against their labels. We found incredible stat crimes: calories understated by half, protein content nearly tripled, and sugar in dishes that shouldn’t have any.

Honestly, I do not blame these kitchens. Margins are tight, delivery windows are brutal, and customers who say they want healthy food mostly want tasty food that feels healthy.

Eating is experiential, and mostly psychological. So the incentives are obvious: to succeed, brands must pour money and resources into how the food feels (the look, name, descriptions, photos, packaging, and flavours) while the food content takes the backseat.

This prompted us to go visit these cloud kitchens to see what’s happening. Why is the nutritional content so horrible? The kitchens are in dirty, dingy commercial complexes, packed with staff, appliances, and produce. We learnt that:

High staff turnover is common (staff are not paid well, and leave when paid a few dollars more; many leave the kitchen and end up in other forms of gig work (delivery, barbers))
Causing inconsistent food quality (high staff turnover means new labour has to be retrained, straining operations)
And an inability to standardise recipes at scale (downstream of labour attrition)

Cloud kitchens are a $20B industry across USA and India, growing 20%+ YoY. The biggest cost centers for existing and new kitchens are:

Branding and marketing
Kitchen operations

The first problem is crowded and a race to zero (multiple aggregators undercutting each other for customer orderflow). We want to tackle the second one.

Thesis

It takes herculean efforts to build a food brand that appeals to people. We want to enable cloud kitchens to focus 100% on the illusion of food a.k.a. branding, without being distracted by operations.

We saw this happen with clothing/accessory brands (outsource solutioning and manufacturing to factories in China, while the team focused on brand), and we will see this happen to food as well. Several well-funded robotics-first players in this space have either overstated their capabilities (automated assembly lines, not actual cooking) or are burning cash fast, with a few already shutting down.

We want to be the world’s first forward-deployed food engineering company (sic), generating recurring revenue through three proven verticals:

AI-native solutioning for Cloud Kitchens, and eventually Defense and Spacetech (our hummus is already space-grade!)
Subscriptions to solutions (recurring vendor business)
Selling data traces to food robotics companies and/or building in-house food automation

Technology

Our R&D org has decades of experience in food automation and are AI-native. We have a production unit in Bengaluru with [redacted], giving us a production capacity of 2,000+ kilograms (of hummus) per month. We use the same [redacted] for other SKU solutioning (gourmet oils, speciality batter, and desserts).

Traction

Revenue: $40,000 Annualised, via

O4H: Before us, O4H struggled with hummus, namely (i) daily wastage, (ii) shelf life of <24 hours, and (iii) nutrient profile (high oil content). We innovated a freeze-dried hummus powder that reconstitutes into ready-to-eat hummus (100% chickpeas, garlic, and tahini only, zero preservatives) that comes rated with a 3-month shelf life. Today, we supply O4H with 600+ kilograms of hummus and falafel every month via their central kitchen to 8+ outlets. This has allowed them to go all in on Mediterranean food.

Fairmont: Using AI, we devised a brand new process for manufacturing gourmet oils at a fraction of market costs and decided to test its gourmet-ness by directly going and pitching to Fairmont, Mumbai. Once again, we instantly got an order for 200 bottles.

Alienkind: TBA

Pizza Bakery: TBA

We’re actively raising a seed round to scale operations and unfuck the food we eat. Reach out at hello@sidb.me or wa.me/+919702070053.