Kapil Chopra, Chairman of the Board at EazyDiner speaking in an interview about the restaurant aggregating company and felt it was time for some introspection. For a company that was dealing entirely with aggregating the dining out experience, the lockdown period during the pandemic was a cruel time.
“For EazyDiner, we came back with a renewed focus. The business trajectory started picking up from August onwards because it was shut for three months. In that time, we built a whole delivery platform for restaurants,” Chopra said.
His view was that while restaurants were constantly complaining about the high fees of delivery aggregators, he was presenting them a way out, to minimize this cost and delivery orders themselves.
“You have got to invest in your own growth. I’m an aggregator on the other side but I’m very happy if people do that, because there’s so much pie. India has six lakh organised restaurants—EazyDiner, only digitised 10,000. 60x restaurants need to be digitised. So, if 3000 restaurants get their act together and actually start doing this, I’m very happy for them. It’s good for the long-term overall health of the industry,” he said.
By way of illustrating his point about self-reliance, Chopra mentioned his high-end hospitality company, Postcard Hotels and Resorts which gets 97 percent of its business directly on its own website, because they had made the investment where it mattered.
Due to the initiatives they took, EazyDiner became more aggressive. They increased their market share dramatically with bookings per customer increasing by 40 percent. Again, there was an increase which began only in January and February. EazyDiner’s churn rate, a number which is defined as the number of people leaving the platform dropped drastically by close to 75 percent. Their lifetime value moved up by close to 28 percent, all before March and another downturn in business, Chopra said.
EazyDiner also tied up with banks to give offers on deliveries by restaurants which further reduces prices for customers without hitting the incomes of the outlets, he added. The restaurant business and eating out will come out of this current situation, once restaurants are open and business begins, people will once again begin to eat out, he firmly believed.
“The key business at EazyDiner is promoting eating out because eating out defines the culture of a city. Eating out is never going to go out of fashion, it will drop due to Covid—it’s a phenomenal business,” Chopra said.
They were quiet at the moment because eating out in restaurants was shut, but the company had enough money to last for the next two years, so the current situation didn’t worry him from the point of view of shutting down.
“Our business has been hit. We would have doubled our revenue last year and had a very good chance of touching INR 100 crores of revenue last year. We already told our investors that will be profitable as of March 31, (2021)—by the end of February, I was nearly profitable,” he said. “I keep on telling restaurants three things to concentrate on, as somebody who’s come from that business—digitize yourself, own your data and focus on building a direct business. Aggregators are your partners,” he said, adding that the idea was to build long term businesses.
