CloudEats is a Philippines-based food and beverages services startup that operates the country’s largest cloud kitchen, serving more than three thousand customers daily with their hot, freshly cooked and affordable meals. The cloud kitchen startup only recently established itself in the middle of 2019, but already has its sights set on changing the dining habits of the rapidly emerging middle class of the Philippines. Co-founded by serial entrepreneurs Kimberly Yao and Iacopo Rovere, they bring their many years of experience and expertise in the competitive food and beverages industry to the newly established startup as it seeks to establish a solid foothold in the country and, in the two distinguished individual’s own words, revolutionize kitchen operations throughout the Southeast Asia region and become its preeminent online food group along the way.
The food and beverages services startup has ambitious plans of expanding its business to new markets abroad over the next two years, and is prepared to spread its unique kitchen operations concept across the region by developing more than one hundred cloud kitchens across Southeast Asia. Avoiding the conventional restaurant business model, CloudEats instead selects non-retail locations that provide favourable cost-effective spaces for the design and implementation of layouts that are specially tailored for food delivery operations and services. Consequently, the startup is able to offer highly competitive prices that are approximately fifteen to twenty percent lower than their competitors while generating healthy profits and high productivity. Presently, the company is running five cloud kitchens in the Philippines, and their in-house brands serve more than three thousand customers daily with a wide selection of affordable healthy food choices including local favorites, rice bowls and chicken wings.
The cloud kitchen startup’s food brands are available for delivery on all of the Philippine’s main food delivery service platforms, such as Lalafood, Grab Food and Foodpanda. It is noteworthy to point out that CloudEats’ co-founder and chief operating officer, Iacopo Rovere, was the one who started Foodpanda Philippines and was the company’s former chief executive officer. According to Brian Cu, country head of Grab Philippines, CloudEats’ business model is an excellent complement to food delivery services as its focus on delivery with low startup costs means that it can offer delicious meals at competitive prices.
Amidst the covid-19 pandemic, the food and beverages services startup has launched an initiative to provide the country’s healthcare providers and frontliners with freshly cooked hot meals. Members of the public can opt to buy meals from the company that are then donated to the country’s frontliners, medical staff and other local government units that are leading the fight against the coronavirus outbreak. Thus far, CloudEats has donated more than sixty thousand meals from more than nine hundred donors, and has served more than twenty hospitals across the country, including the Philippine General Hospital and San Juan Medical Center.
Recently, the cloud kitchen startup successfully secured US$1.4 million in a seed round of funding that saw the participation of regional angel investors. Local family offices led CloudEats’ seed financing round, and the freshly acquired funds will enable the startup to fuel its expansion plans across the region while adding at least twenty new cloud kitchens in the Philippines.
