Why EatClub Food App Is Slowly Failing
Where ₹99 meals promise everything but deliver disappointment.
A Novel Model
EatClub runs cloud kitchens. They own the brands, control the supply chain, eliminate restaurant commissions. BOX8, MOJO Pizza, Itminaan Matka Biryani, LeanCrust Pizza, Mealful Rolls, WeFit Bowls, Daily Kitchen. Seven brands from 400+ kitchens across seven cities. The pricing destroys competition. Flat 30% off every order, no conditions. Zero delivery fees, zero packaging fees, zero platform fees. A pizza for ₹99. A biryani for ₹99. A homely meal for ₹99. It costs little more for more variety.
Traditional food delivery can’t match this. Zomato takes 15-25% commission from restaurants. Restaurants inflate prices to cover it. Then add delivery fees and platform fees. A basic meal costs ₹200 on Zomato. EatClub delivers similar food for ₹99. The model makes perfect sense on paper. Own the kitchens, standardize production, eliminate middlemen, pass savings to customers. Cloud kitchens reduce real estate costs. Central procurement reduces ingredient costs. Standardized recipes reduce waste.
This should be the future of food delivery.
Numbers Tell Another Story
EatClub raised $97.7 million over 14 rounds. The latest Series D in July 2025 brought $22 million led by Tiger Global. Current valuation sits at ₹5,070 crore as of August 2025. Annual revenue runs ₹516 crore. They employ 3,656 people. They operate 400+ cloud kitchens across Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, and Kolkata. They serve 25 million customers. That sounds impressive until you do the math.
₹516 crore revenue divided by 25 million customers equals ₹206 annual spend per customer. That’s ₹17 per month. Less than one order monthly. The app has over 5 million installs with a 4.7-star rating. But customer frequency is terrible. People try EatClub once or twice and disappear. Compare this to regular food delivery. Active customers order 4-6 times monthly on Zomato or Swiggy. EatClub gets less than once monthly. That’s not a business, that’s a failed experiment repeated 25 million times.
The valuation of ₹5,070 crore on ₹516 crore revenue is a 10x multiple. That only works if explosive growth is coming. Four years after starting with pizza, they still have just seven brands. Growth isn’t coming. Tiger Global doesn’t fund slow movers. They funded EatClub in July expecting acceleration. Four months later, nothing has changed. No new cuisines announced. No major expansion revealed. The funding sits idle while competitors move faster.
The Business Problems
EatClub started with pizza four years ago. Today they have seven brands. Four years for seven brands is glacial in food delivery. The menu expansion problem is critical. Pizza gets boring. Biryani gets repetitive. Customers need variety. South Indian breakfast is the obvious next move. Idli, vada, dosa, upma. Easy to prepare, massive demand, high margins, simple supply chain.
Every cloud kitchen already has the equipment. Steamers for idli, fryers for vada, flat pans for dosa. No new machinery needed. Breakfast is underserved in delivery. Zomato and Swiggy struggle because restaurants don’t open early. Cloud kitchens could start at 6 AM and own the breakfast market. But EatClub hasn’t launched it. Four years and they haven’t added the easiest, most profitable expansion in their business.
Chinese food is another obvious gap. North Indian thali. Punjabi meals. Regional cuisines. Each addition uses existing kitchen infrastructure. Marginal cost is minimal. But nothing happens. The slow expansion kills frequency. Customers order pizza twice, get bored, leave. If they offered ten cuisines instead of seven brands, frequency would triple. Same customer base, triple the revenue.
The market is wide open. Rebel Foods runs cloud kitchens but prices like traditional delivery. Zomato and Swiggy aggregate restaurants but carry heavy commission costs. Nobody else offers permanent 30% discounts with zero fees at EatClub’s scale. Yet they’re not grabbing it. Competitors are watching. If EatClub figures out expansion, Zomato will copy it with deeper pockets. The window is closing.
Operational issues compound the problem. Customer complaints about late deliveries appear frequently. Wrong orders reach customers. Customer support is poor. Growing to 400 kitchens created strain they haven’t fixed. The model also confuses some customers. The “EatClub subscription fee” contradicts the “free delivery” messaging. The marketing isn’t clear. People expect completely free orders and feel misled.
The Customer Experience Problem
The real killer is the food itself. It’s bland. This isn’t data analysis. This is direct experience. Order their Pao Bhaji, it lacks excitement. No vibration from a cook who cares. No anxiety to serve well. No pride in the final product. The food tastes like assembly line production. Measured ingredients, timed cooking, standardized recipes. Consistent mediocrity across 400 locations.
Their pizza works because conveyor belt cooking suits pizza. Standardization doesn’t hurt pizza quality. But Pao Bhaji needs adjustment. Someone tasting and adding spices. Someone checking if today’s tomatoes are sweeter. Someone who cares if the customer enjoys it. EatClub removed that person. They installed operators who follow instructions. The operators don’t taste. They don’t adjust. They check boxes and move on.
Compare this to real restaurants. Chaos in the kitchen creates good food. Cooks yelling orders, pans clanging, someone tasting and fixing. The head cook inspects plates before they leave. That chaos has energy. That energy goes into the food. Cloud kitchens have silence. Timers beeping, boxes being filled, food moving down production lines. No energy, no soul, no reason to return.
Customers notice. They try EatClub once because ₹99 is attractive. The food disappoints. They don’t order again. The 30% discount doesn’t matter if food tastes like cardboard. That’s why frequency is terrible. Not because of pricing, not because of delivery issues, not because of limited menu. Because the food is forgettable.
The Discussion
The puzzle pieces didn’t fit initially. Great model, solid funding, open market, yet glacial growth. Why? The theory was that cloud kitchens can’t produce good food at scale. Assembly lines kill soul. Economic pressure removes caring. Low wages attract operators, not passionate cooks. The model itself was doomed. But that theory was wrong. The evidence proved it.
Gurudwaras feed 100,000 people daily at industrial scale. The food tastes good. People want to eat it. The langar has soul because someone cares about feeding God’s children. Scale doesn’t kill quality there.
Sitaram Diwan Chand sells chole bhature through Zomato and Swiggy. One product, industrial production, sells out by 5 PM daily. If it was bland, they wouldn’t have lines. They wouldn’t run out. Industrial scale works fine when executed properly. Temple kitchens produce quality food for thousands. Simple menus, massive volumes, consistent quality. Others manage it successfully.
EatClub’s pizza works because conveyor belt suits pizza. Their other products fail because of bad quality control, not because the model is broken. The problem isn’t economics or scale or assembly lines. The problem is management failure. They’re not monitoring kitchen output. They’re not tasting food before it goes out. They’re not training cooks properly. They’re not responding to customer complaints about taste.
Quality control is fixable. McDonald’s maintains consistency across 40,000 locations. Dominos does it. Haldirams does it. Others manage industrial scale with quality. EatClub should too. Maybe management doesn’t know. They sit in offices looking at spreadsheets. Nobody eats the food. Nobody visits kitchens. Nobody talks to disappointed customers. Or maybe they know but don’t care. Hit volume targets, raise more funding, hope someone acquires them before customers abandon completely. That’s the startup playbook for some founders.
Or maybe they’re trying but failing. Quality control at 400 locations is hard. But others do it. EatClub’s failure is execution, not destiny. The model can produce good food at scale. Others prove it daily. EatClub doesn’t because they’re not trying hard enough or don’t know how.
The Solutions
EatClub can turn this around. Bad execution is fixable. The model works when managed properly.
Fix Quality Control Immediately
Visit every kitchen monthly. Taste random dishes. Compare them to standards. Fire cooks who consistently produce bad food. Reward kitchens with high ratings. Create a mystery shopper program. Order from your own kitchens anonymously. Rate the food honestly. Fix what’s broken. Track complaints by location and dish. If Mumbai Kitchen 12 gets bad biryani reviews, investigate immediately. If Bangalore Kitchen 7 gets good pizza reviews, replicate their process everywhere. Hire regional quality managers who eat the food daily. Give them power to shut down kitchens that fail standards. Make quality control a serious function with real authority.
Hire Cooks Who Actually Care
Pay cooks ₹35,000 monthly instead of ₹18,000. Better wages attract people who care about cooking, not just people who need jobs. Hire cooks who cook at home. People who know how food should taste. People with personal pride who won’t send out garbage. Create small teams where each cook owns specific brands. If BOX8 biryani gets bad reviews, that cook faces consequences. If MOJO Pizza gets five stars, that cook gets bonuses. Give cooks authority to adjust recipes when needed. Let them taste and fix. Accept slight inconsistency in exchange for better average quality. Standardization is fine but not when it produces bland food.
Expand the Menu Aggressively
Launch South Indian breakfast by January 2026. Idli, vada, dosa, upma. Test it in Mumbai first. Roll out to six other cities by March. Charge ₹99 for idli-vada combo. ₹99 for dosa meal. ₹99 for upma breakfast. Same pricing, different meal times. Customers will order twice daily instead of twice monthly. Add North Indian thali by mid-2026. Dal, roti, sabzi, rice. Another easy cuisine with huge demand.
Then add Punjabi. Then Gujarati. Then Bengali. Stick with Indian regional cuisines where you have expertise. Skip Chinese for now, it’s too messy and inconsistent. Each new cuisine uses existing infrastructure. Same kitchens, same riders, same app. The marginal cost is minimal. The revenue impact is massive.
Improve Operations
Fix delivery timing issues. Twenty-five minutes is acceptable. Forty-five minutes isn’t. Train riders better. Optimize routes with better technology. Clarify the subscription messaging. Don’t confuse customers about what’s free and what isn’t. Transparent pricing builds trust. Improve customer support. Respond to complaints quickly. Fix problems before customers leave forever.
Measure What Matters
Track customer frequency by cuisine. Which dishes drive repeat orders? Which ones kill retention? Double down on winners, fix or remove losers. Monitor kitchen utilization rates. Which kitchens are efficient? Which ones waste food? Replicate best practices across all locations. Watch food waste percentages. High waste means bad forecasting or bad quality control. Fix it. Track employee turnover by kitchen. High turnover means bad management or bad working conditions. Fix it. The data exists. Use it to improve operations instead of just raising more funding.
The Timeline
If nothing changes by March 2026, the model is effectively dead. Six months after Tiger funding with zero expansion means paralysis is permanent. If they announce major changes in January, the slow period was strategic. Right now the company is drifting. Good economics, bad execution, wasted potential. Watson, the dog was sleeping, not sick.
The Bottom Line
EatClub isn’t failing because cloud kitchens can’t work. It’s failing because they’re producing bland food and not fixing it. The solution isn’t complicated. Taste the food. Fix what’s broken. Hire people who care. Expand the menu. Improve operations. Execute properly. Do that and the model works. The customers return. The frequency improves. The business succeeds.
Keep producing bland food and the company dies slowly. The funding runs out. The customers disappear. The graveyard fills with another startup that had everything except execution. The choice is theirs. Fix quality control or watch competitors copy the model and execute it better.
Watson, the dog can bark. It just needs someone to teach it how.