Bangalore based Itsmymeal, which recently closed its online consumer channel and shifted its focus to serving healthy food to corporates and startups has launched a brick & mortar dine-in cafe in the city for retail customers.
In April 2012, when we profiled Itsmymeal – it was only catering to B2C segment with around 300 registered consumers. Currently Itsmymeal is only operational in Bangalore and being a location specific service, it has not grown its B2C share on priority. However, most of its customers have been eating with them on regular basis through their dine-in service, the company says.
But why did the startup shift its focus from the retail consumer segment? Neeraj Kumar, co founder & Director, Itsmymeal said “B2B is an exciting space considering you can make a larger impact and have assured support on your bottom and top lines. ItsMyMeal is focused on delivering value to small size corporate opportunities where they look for healthy food with no hassle of managing food distribution infrastructure”.
To have a better connect with its retail customers, the startup recently launched Dine-in service through its first “ItsMyMeal Café” at HSR Layout (Bangalore). With the help of cafe Itsmymeal expects to reach out to a large retail market to serve consumers homely, healthy meals and snacks.
On B2B (corporate) front, Itsmymeal is being positioned as an HR initiative to help employees with right food to live a healthy life. However, getting into B2B is not easy, points out Kumar “It is a very challenging task to become a sole partner to any mid-big corporate due to huge diversity in taste expectation and price sensitivity.”
The major challenge in B2B and B2C is about freedom for the end consumer to choose what she/he wants to eat. “Since in B2B (if you are sole vendor) that freedom is compromised, you run the business with huge risk of managing end customer satisfaction and that’s the reason the trend in this industry is to change the vendor in 3-6 month time frame”, said Kumar.
