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Yumist – Yummy food that didn’t last long, Why did it fall?

Launched in 2014, Yumist was a food delivery venture that was started by Alok Jain and Abhimanyu Maheshwari which was later s
Launched in 2014, Yumist was a food delivery venture that was started by Alok Jain and Abhimanyu Maheshwari which was later shut down.

Launched in 2014, Yumist was a food delivery venture that was started by ex-CMO of Zomato, Alok Jain, in collaboration with Abhimanyu Maheshwari, who had his fair share of professional experience in the Indian food and beverage sector.

Yumist founders - Alok Jain and Abhimanya Maheshwari
Yumist founders – Alok Jain and Abhimanyu Maheshwari

The startup was aimed at delivering simple, comforting, and home-cooked meals where they would prepare the meals themselves.

Yumist’s vision, growth, and funding

Yumist wanted to deliver the food by combining the market with technology using an app that would help people to order food, track the food, and understand the customer service logistics. Many delivery companies were in this field, but they could only fulfill one or two of these criteria, and this was the right market for the founders to launch Yumist.

Starting from Gurgaon in 2015, Yumist had a central kitchen in Gurgaon where they would prepare food, and then the food went to the centers across the city, and then it got delivered to customers. With decent orders, they decided to expand to Bengaluru in 2016 and planned to scale five more cities, including Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and then Chennai and Kolkata in 2017.

The plans were sorted, but the funding rounds didn’t cooperate with the company plans wherein first seed round, they got $1 million and in second round got $2 million as funding. By 2017, the company was hitting the profit margins of Rs.65 per order, with an average delivery time of 20 minutes. But why did it shut down?

The fall of Yumist

Yumist posted on their blog that due to many internal and external factors, they’ll have to shut down the company, but they created these factors. One of the reasons was the expansion to other cities as well as expanding the capacity and space of the existing ones, which burned a lot of cash. Services in the current cities needed improvement, but adding a new kitchen was putting a strain on the company.

Yumist introduced the concept of cloud kitchens in the food tech industry, and the investors were positive about it, but due to the circumstances and mismanagement, they had to shut down their shop.

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