r/FoodEntrepreneurIndia

Just looking at the math for a small cafe or cloud kitchen, and it honestly feels completely broken.

Let’s say you do around ₹2 Lakhs a month in online orders. By the time you pay the 35% commission and add the extra money you have to spend on ads just to show up on the app feed, you are easily losing ₹70,000 to ₹80,000 a month.

Think about that. You are paying eighty thousand rupees every single month just to deliver food to people who live less than 4 or 5 kilometers away from you. They are literally your neighbors.

What if we just stopped renting our own customers?

What if we took a tiny slice of that money—say ₹10,000 to ₹15,000—and spent it on simple Instagram ads targeting just our own colony or neighborhood, and gave them a direct way to order from us?

I know the biggest headache is always: "Who will deliver the food? Managing delivery guys is a nightmare." But what if you just use a dedicated rider app to manage a pool of multiple riders seamlessly?

For the delivery fee, you don’t even have to bear the whole cost. There are a few ways to handle it:

1. You can let the customer pay the full rider fee.

After 4 to 5 months of doing this, the local crowd gets into the habit of ordering directly, and you completely stop paying a permanent tax to giant tech apps.

Has anyone actually tried setting up their own riders and splitting the fees like this? Does the math hold up in the long run, or is managing the riders too much of a practical headache?

Started a Zomato Partner account purely out of my passion for cooking. Five minutes into the onboarding, buried under pages of legal jargon and one-sided contracts, I stopped feeling like a business owner and started feeling like a slave signing away my freedom. For a moment, it genuinely felt like the East India Company had just rebranded.

Hello Entrepreneurs

We help founders turn their product ideas into market-ready products.

Our process starts with understanding your idea in depth. We then work on developing and refining the formulation, repeating the process until we achieve the desired result. You're welcome to visit and test the product during development, or we can ship trial batches to you for feedback.

If required, we also provide scientific consultation and ensure the product meets all relevant FSSAI compliance requirements. Once the formulation is finalized, we can facilitate complete nutritional and laboratory analysis.

To help you scale, we connect you with pilot plants for manufacturing and support you in preparing the product for commercial production. Finally, we also assist with digital marketing so your product is ready to be sold across multiple channels.

If you're building a food or beverage brand and this sounds interesting, feel free to DM me. I'd be happy to discuss your idea.

I'm 21 from bihar

I want to start business and scale it with minimum 2-3 outlets in 2-3years. Just the last day i was thinking to start a cafe business but elders says that it has too much drawbacks like food wastage, marketing problem, cafe hype, AND THE BIGGEST ONE IS MARGIN is very low.

But I'm ready to face the all problems

Still i need someone who own a good aesthetic cafe and have 2 or 3 or more branches of it and i want him to help me by telling me every problem he had to face when he start his business and how he face.

As I'm too much confused with all the questions myself like :

From where the raw materials will come?

How can i find skilled cooks and what will be the staff salary?

What to do if the food will left at the end of the day??

How can i manage my finance in this business.

And some tips for marketing..

So if someone want to help me with my problem then please, it will be great help.

Background- Franchise owner(Aman) is my 2nd eldest brother's (Arsh)bestest friend, they have been together for longer than I am alive (I am 21). Arsh now lives abroad, and Aman didn't wanted that and asked him to open a franchise with him, but he wanted to study more. My eldest brother(Parm) was fead from his banking job, been in that sector for 15+ years. Recently, Aman got married and we went there and Aman pitched idea for opening a franchise in another city around 50kms away as there are already three branches in our city. Parm liked it, and did all things and now we opening a restaurant 11 days ago.

This all was to tell that Aman wants the best for us, he is like family.

Our first and second weekend and they weekdays between these went amazing, ~15k sales on weekdays and ~25k on all weekends. But now the sales are a bit down, to 10-12k these three weekdays (Monday through Wednesday) which is to be expected, people have tried a new thing in their town, which is only present in 6-6 other places in the state.

So me and Parm wanted to get on Zomato and Swiggy, to nudge the sales our desired 15k per day mark. Aman says it's not profitable, they put heavy discounts for customer and sometimes he is barely able to make profit from those sales. I worked at Aman's shop too, and once saw bill of ₹70 for ₹169 pasta. So it's kinda understandable.

The restaurant mainly services ice creams and products made from it (live ice cream rolls, live gravity sundae, waffles, etc), along with pasta, sandwiches, wraps and fries for snacks, and we most of our sale is during 9-11pm, around 70-80% of it. Most people don't want to come out in scorching heat, so we think Zomato and Swiggy could be profitable. We could always charge 5-10% more on them.

He has experience of running two branches for around 8 years, so he knows much more than us. Parm has been in banking sector his whole life and I am 2nd year of college.

What do you think, hop on or not?

Hi! I’ve been thinking about the growing gym culture in tier-2 cities, and I have an idea I’m excited to explore. I’m looking to launch a protein meal subscription service tailored to the fitness enthusiasts in these cities. With gyms popping up everywhere, I believe there’s a big opportunity here. I’m on the lookout for co-founders or collaborators—whether you’re a builder, someone with operational experience, or just passionate about the idea. If this resonates, shoot me a DM, and let’s see what we can build together!

I'm confused in between making this business... do i need to make it for regional market or for premium customer??????

Built a WhatsApp bot so restaurant owners can track their actual daily profit — would love feedback from this community

Most small restaurant and cafe owners I've spoken to know their sales for the day by closing time, but not their actual profit — vendor costs, staff, rent — until weeks later, if ever. The usual options are an accounting app (too much friction, nobody opens it daily) or a bookkeeper (too slow, monthly not daily).

So I built FinMitra ( Website) — you just send a WhatsApp message with a vendor bill (photo or text) like you'd normally do, and it automatically logs and categorizes it. Ask "what's my profit today" anytime and get a straight answer back in the same chat. No app to install, no dashboard to learn.

It's live with one pilot restaurant in Bengaluru right now (Tea Day, Munnekollal) and working well enough that I'm starting to take it to a few more owners.

Posting here because I'd genuinely value perspectives from this community — particularly:

• If you run or know small F&B businesses, does this match a real pain point you've seen, or am I missing something bigger?
• Anyone tried something similar (WhatsApp-native tools for SMB ops) — what worked or didn't?
• Pricing-wise, I'm testing 2 months free then ₹500/month — does that feel right for a single-outlet restaurant?

Happy to share more details or answer questions. Not trying to hard-sell here, mainly looking for honest reactions before I scale outreach.