Curefoods Case Study: How One Company Built 10 Food Brands

Curefoods case study on how one company built 10 food brands

The next time you order a health bowl from EatFit and biryani from Sharief Bhai in the same week, there’s a good chance both came out of the exact same kitchen, run by the same company, sold to you as two completely unrelated brands.

That company is Curefoods, and running ten brands out of shared kitchens wasn’t the original plan. It started as a single health-food brand, EatFit, that nearly went out of business during the pandemic, and it rebuilt itself around one idea: people don’t want to eat the same way every single day.

This Curefoods success story covers how that rebuild happened, from one struggling brand to a ten-brand, ₹746 crore food platform, and what the company is still working through as it tries to scale even further.

Table of Contents

  1. Quick Facts: Curefoods at a Glance
  2. How a Pandemic Nearly Killed EatFit, and Nagori Rebuilt It as Curefoods
  3. Why Curefoods Bets on Ten Brands Instead of One
  4. One Kitchen, Five Brands: Inside Curefoods’ Cooking Model
  5. Who Really Owns the Customer: Curefoods, Swiggy, or Zomato?
  6. The ₹1.27 Problem: Curefoods’ Growth-vs-Loss Math
  7. Why Bengaluru Still Decides Curefoods’ Fate
  8. Ten Brands, Two Carrying the Weight
  9. The Rival Twice Its Size: Curefoods vs. Rebel Foods
  10. Betting on Doughnuts: Why Krispy Kreme Is Curefoods’ Offline Play
  11. The Pivot in One Line: From “Gym Food” to “How India Actually Eats”
  12. The 70% Number Behind EatFit’s Loyalty
  13. Twelve Rounds, One Investor Who Mattered Most
  14. The IPO That Got This Close, and Why It Didn’t Happen
  15. The Attrition Number Nobody’s Talking About
  16. The Growth Cap Nagori Set for Himself
  17. Curefoods Success Story: Frequently Asked Questions
  18. What This Curefoods Success Story Really Proves

Quick Facts: Curefoods at a Glance

Founded (as Curefoods) October 2020, spun off from Cure.fit’s EatFit vertical
Founders (Cure.fit, 2016) Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori
Business model Multi-brand cloud kitchen “house of brands”
FY25 revenue ₹745.8 crore, up from ₹585.2 crore in FY24
FY25 net loss ₹170 crore, down from ₹342 crore in FY23
Total locations 502, across 70+ Indian cities
Key brands EatFit, CakeZone, Sharief Bhai, Krispy Kreme, Olio Pizza, and 5 others
Total funding raised Roughly $255 to 300 million across 12+ rounds
Largest investor Binny Bansal, Flipkart co-founder
Direct competitor scale Rebel Foods posted ~₹1,617 crore FY25 revenue at a ~$1.4 billion valuation

How a Pandemic Nearly Killed EatFit, and Nagori Rebuilt It as Curefoods

Before it was Curefoods, it was one line item inside someone else’s business. EatFit sat under Cure.fit, the preventive-healthcare platform Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori founded in 2016, alongside Cult.fit, Care.fit, and Mind.fit. EatFit ran cloud kitchens and subscription meal plans built for a narrow customer: someone already going to the gym, already careful about food.

Then the pandemic hit, and it didn’t just slow EatFit down, it broke the business it was sitting inside of. Cure.fit’s fitness and clinic revenue collapsed, and EatFit went down with it. Monthly revenue fell from ₹15 crore to ₹2 crore. The kitchen network shrank from 60 to 10, all of them in Bengaluru. There was no cushion left, no parent company positioned to absorb the hit.

In October 2020, EatFit was cut loose. Ankit Nagori traded his Cure.fit stake for majority ownership of a new, independent company: Curefoods. What happened next wasn’t really an operational fix. It was a rewrite of what the company was for. Health food for gym-goers had turned out to be too small an idea to fund real scale, so Curefoods rebuilt itself around a bigger one: food for however India actually eats, healthy on a Tuesday, indulgent on a Friday, whatever a customer wants without switching apps.

Why Curefoods Bets on Ten Brands Instead of One

Most food companies pick a cuisine and defend it. Curefoods did the opposite. It runs a roll-up model: acquire or build several food brands, then run them all on the same kitchens, the same supply chain, and the same technology stack. Starting with EatFit, the portfolio grew to include CakeZone, Sharief Bhai, Nomad Pizza, Frozen Bottle, Olio Pizza, Great Indian Khichdi, Home Plate, Rolls On Wheels, and Krispy Kreme.

The logic only works if the brands don’t compete with each other for the same order. Health, biryani, pizza, and dessert stay positioned separately, and together they cover every part of the day, breakfast through late-night cravings, without any single brand needing to be everything to everyone. It’s the same portfolio logic showing up across India’s broader startup funding boom, where investors increasingly back platforms that spread risk across several products rather than one flagship bet.

One Kitchen, Five Brands: Inside Curefoods’ Cooking Model

Here’s the part that actually makes the roll-up work financially: the same kitchen cooks for multiple brands at once. One location might turn out EatFit bowls, CakeZone desserts, and Sharief Bhai biryani in the same shift, off the same standardized process.

That’s why Curefoods tracks success at the kitchen level, not the brand level. Kitchen EBITDA, not any one brand’s profit and loss, is the number that actually decides whether a new city gets a kitchen. Hosting four or more brands under one roof spreads rent and staffing costs across a far bigger sales volume than a single-brand kitchen could ever generate, and it smooths out the natural lull between meal times.

Behind the kitchens sits a hub-and-spoke supply chain: central manufacturing units in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Pune produce most of the finished or semi-finished food, moved through a cold chain to local kitchens for last-mile assembly. It keeps quality consistent city to city, and it’s also what makes acquiring a new brand relatively cheap. A new menu slots into production lines that already exist, instead of needing its own factory.

Who Really Owns the Customer: Curefoods, Swiggy, or Zomato?

Curefoods earns money four ways: third-party delivery apps, its own brand websites and apps, dine-in restaurants, and takeaway kiosks. Roughly 82 percent of FY25 revenue still moved through delivery platforms, down slightly from 85 to 86 percent in earlier years. Online orders overall, aggregators plus brand sites, made up about 70 percent of the business, with offline covering the rest.

The uncomfortable number sitting underneath all of it: aggregator commissions run 18 to 22 percent of order value. That’s the toll Curefoods pays for the reach that built it, and it’s also the clearest reason the company keeps talking about owning more of its own channels.

The ₹1.27 Problem: Curefoods’ Growth-vs-Loss Math

Metric FY23 FY24 FY25
Revenue from operations ₹382 crore ₹585 crore ₹746 crore
Net loss ₹342 crore ₹173 crore ₹170 crore
EBITDA loss ~₹276 crore ~ ~₹58 crore

Revenue nearly doubled between FY23 and FY25, close to 40 percent annual growth. Net losses fell hard after FY23 and have since leveled off around ₹170 crore. EBITDA losses narrowed even more sharply, from about ₹276 crore down to roughly ₹58 crore, which is the real evidence that unit economics are improving, even while the bottom line stays red.

But one number in the filings does more work than any of the others. In FY25, Curefoods spent about ₹1.27 for every ₹1 of revenue it brought in. Total expenses hit around ₹944 crore against ₹746 crore in revenue. Growth is real here. Profit isn’t, not yet, and that gap is exactly what ends up deciding whether an IPO clears or stalls.

Why Bengaluru Still Decides Curefoods’ Fate

As of March 31, 2025, Curefoods ran 502 locations across more than 70 Indian cities: 281 cloud kitchens, 122 restaurants, 99 kiosks, and 13 warehouses. On paper, that’s a company spread wide across the country.

In practice, it isn’t spread that evenly at all. Eight cities, Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, and Ahmedabad, account for roughly 250 of those locations. And within online ordering specifically, Bengaluru alone drives about 40 percent of revenue, with Delhi-NCR at 15 percent, Mumbai at 13 percent, Hyderabad at 12 percent, Chennai at 8 percent, and Pune at 4 percent. That’s not an accident. It’s a direct line back to 2020, when Curefoods was a Bengaluru-only spin-off rebuilding from 10 kitchens. Dubai, the company’s first overseas store, is the first small sign that dependency might loosen over time.

Ten Brands, Two Carrying the Weight

Brand Category
EatFit Healthy everyday meals
CakeZone Cakes and desserts
Sharief Bhai Biryani and Mughlai cuisine
Nomad Pizza / Juno’s Pizza Pizza
Great Indian Khichdi / Home Plate Indian comfort food
Frozen Bottle Desserts and beverages
Olio Pizza Pizza
Rolls On Wheels Rolls and snacking
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and coffee

Ten brands make up more than 98 percent of Curefoods’ FY25 revenue, and four of them, EatFit, CakeZone, Sharief Bhai, and Olio Pizza, have each crossed ₹100 crore in annualized sales on their own. But look closer at the split, and the portfolio isn’t as balanced as ten logos suggests. Sharief Bhai and EatFit together generate close to 40 percent of total revenue. Eight brands are splitting what’s left.

The Rival Twice Its Size: Curefoods vs. Rebel Foods

Curefoods isn’t the only company betting on multi-brand cloud kitchens in India, and it isn’t even the biggest one.

Company FY25 Revenue FY25 Net Loss Valuation
Curefoods ₹745.8 crore ₹170 crore ~₹4,000 crore IPO ask (2026); ~$445 to 500 million pre-IPO
Rebel Foods (Faasos, Behrouz Biryani, Oven Story) ₹1,617.4 crore ₹336.6 crore ~$1.4 billion
EatClub Brands (Box8, Mojo Pizza) ₹749.5 crore Not yet filed ~₹4,585 crore (~$540 million)
Wow! Momo ~₹625 to 640 crore Not yet filed ~₹2,838 crore (~$316 million)

Rebel Foods posted more than double Curefoods’ revenue and carries roughly three times its valuation. That gap matters more than it might look, because it’s essentially the same math the market used when Curefoods went looking for an IPO price. EatClub Brands is the one to watch here too, up 45 percent year on year and now closing in on Curefoods’ revenue with a smaller footprint. Scale alone isn’t winning this category. Growth rate is starting to matter just as much.

Betting on Doughnuts: Why Krispy Kreme Is Curefoods’ Offline Play

On December 30, 2024, Curefoods signed an international development and franchise agreement with Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporation, taking over nearly 50 outlets across South and West India that Landmark Group’s Citymax had been running. Five months later, in May 2025, that deal expanded to pan-India rights, adding 11 Delhi-NCR stores, seven retail outlets and four cloud kitchens, and pushing the brand past 100 locations nationwide.

Nagori called it building “a unified strategy for brand growth” across the country, with Delhi NCR as the starting point (World Coffee Portal, May 2025). It’s a telling choice of brand to lead with. Krispy Kreme isn’t a delivery-first concept. It’s a walk-in, sit-down, buy-a-box-on-the-way-out brand, exactly the kind of format Curefoods needs if it’s serious about reducing how much of its business runs through Swiggy and Zomato.

The Pivot in One Line: From “Gym Food” to “How India Actually Eats”

Every brand story Curefoods tells now traces back to one repositioning: from health food for gym-goers to a platform built for however India actually eats. It’s a small phrase, but it’s doing a lot of work, letting each brand keep a sharp, single-note identity while the company underneath gets to talk about trust and reach instead of any one cuisine.

Because the business is so delivery-heavy, most customer discovery still happens inside Swiggy and Zomato, through ratings, paid placement, and promotions, backed by data on local taste and demand. But founder-led interviews carry a lot of the brand-building weight too. Nagori has described the company plainly as “a house of food brands” (The Ken, March 2026), a phrase that’s since become shorthand for the whole model. In an earlier conversation, he traced the idea back to the company’s founding, describing Curefoods as built around “a brand that stood for trust, quality, and balance” (Adgully, November 2025).

The 70% Number Behind EatFit’s Loyalty

Here’s a retention stat that’s easy to skim past and shouldn’t be: Nagori has said roughly 70 percent of people who subscribe to EatFit never leave the platform. They either stay subscribed or move up into the membership tier, Food Pass.

The mechanics behind that number are fairly simple. Subscribers order about seven times a month on average through pre-paid meal plans, and the membership program is built to catch the next tier up, customers ordering between seven and thirty times a month, with perks like free shipping. The multi-brand structure adds a second layer on top of that: a customer eating EatFit for weekday lunches can switch to CakeZone or Krispy Kreme for a weekend treat without ever leaving the Curefoods ecosystem, which means no single brand has to carry the entire relationship alone.

Twelve Rounds, One Investor Who Mattered Most

Since spinning out in 2020, Curefoods has raised an estimated $255 to 300 million across at least 12 rounds of equity and debt.

  • May 2021: $13 million Series A, led by Iron Pillar, with Nordstar and Binny Bansal participating
  • January 2022: $62 million from Iron Pillar, Chiratae Ventures, Sixteenth Street Capital, and others
  • May 2022: $46 million Series C
  • April 2023: roughly ₹300 crore, about $36 to 37 million
  • 2024 to 2025: multiple Series D and debt rounds

Twelve rounds, a handful of institutional names, and one investor who ended up mattering more than the rest combined. Binny Bansal contributed close to half of all capital raised and became Curefoods’ largest institutional shareholder, well ahead of Iron Pillar, Chiratae Ventures, Accel, and Three State Capital. It’s a funding pattern that echoes what’s happened across other Indian consumer platforms scaling through acquisition, from multi-category mobility and logistics plays to D2C roll-ups chasing similar portfolio economics.

The IPO That Got This Close, and Why It Didn’t Happen

Curefoods filed its draft red herring prospectus with SEBI around June 28 to 30, 2025, proposing a fresh issue of up to ₹800 crore alongside an offer for sale of roughly 4.85 crore equity shares. JM Financial, IIFL Capital Services, and Nuvama Wealth Management ran the book, with KFin Technologies as registrar. SEBI signed off on October 24, 2025.

Then, in early June 2026, it stopped. Curefoods postponed the listing after roadshows failed to secure institutional and mutual-fund support at its sought valuation of roughly ₹4,000 crore. No price band was ever set. No listing date was ever announced.

Put the two numbers next to each other and the reason isn’t hard to see. The market was pricing Curefoods against Rebel Foods, a company with more than double the revenue and nearly three times the valuation, and Curefoods came up short of the figure it wanted. SEBI’s approval lapses around October 2026, and management has floated returning to the IPO market in 2027 if conditions improve. For now, the company that survived a total collapse in 2020 stalled out at the one hurdle that was actually optional.

The Attrition Number Nobody’s Talking About

Two risks sit underneath all the growth numbers, and one of them barely gets mentioned outside the filings.

Fiscal Year Attrition Rate
FY23 116.6%
FY24 127.7%
FY25 111.7%

Attrition above 100 percent, three years running, means more people left the company each year than its average headcount. Alongside that sits the aggregator dependence already covered above: more than 80 percent of revenue running through Swiggy and Zomato, at 18 to 22 percent commission, leaving margins exposed to decisions made by two companies Curefoods doesn’t control.

The Growth Cap Nagori Set for Himself

Most founders talk about growth as something to maximize. Nagori has framed it as something to limit. “20 to 25 percent growth is the maximum we will ever chase,” he said, with new stores opening at a pace of about 75 a year, close to one and a half every week (Business Today, April 2026).

The longer-term plan is still ambitious inside that ceiling: around 1,000 locations, split roughly between 600 cloud kitchens and 350 QSR or casual dining restaurants across about 50 cities, aiming for a 50-50 split between online and offline revenue by FY28. Curefoods is also investing in AI-native kitchens meant to forecast demand before an order is even placed, backed by roughly ₹100 crore a year in debt financing, working toward a stated ₹2,000 crore revenue run rate by FY27.

Curefoods Success Story: Frequently Asked Questions

What is Curefoods?

Curefoods is an Indian multi-brand food company running cloud kitchens, kiosks, and restaurants across more than 70 cities, operating ten major food brands out of shared kitchen infrastructure.

Who founded Curefoods?

Curefoods traces back to Cure.fit, founded in 2016 by Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori. Its food vertical, EatFit, became the independent company Curefoods in October 2020, with Nagori taking majority ownership.

How much revenue does Curefoods make?

Curefoods reported revenue of ₹745.8 crore in FY25, up from ₹585.2 crore in FY24 and ₹382 crore in FY23.

Is Curefoods profitable?

No. Curefoods posted a net loss of ₹170 crore in FY25, though EBITDA losses have narrowed sharply, from about ₹276 crore to ₹58 crore over two years.

Is Curefoods still planning an IPO?

Curefoods filed its DRHP in June 2025 and got SEBI approval in October 2025, but shelved the listing in June 2026 after failing to secure the valuation it wanted. No new listing date has been announced.

How does Curefoods compare to Rebel Foods?

Rebel Foods, India’s largest cloud kitchen operator, posted about ₹1,617 crore in FY25 revenue at a valuation near $1.4 billion, roughly double Curefoods’ revenue and nearly three times its valuation ask.

What brands does Curefoods own?

Curefoods’ portfolio includes EatFit, CakeZone, Sharief Bhai, Nomad Pizza, Juno’s Pizza, Great Indian Khichdi, Home Plate, Frozen Bottle, Olio Pizza, Rolls On Wheels, and Krispy Kreme.

What This Curefoods Success Story Really Proves

Strip away the brand names and this Curefoods success story is really about two moments five years apart. In 2020, the company survived a collapse that would have killed most single-brand businesses, because it hadn’t built itself around just one brand. In 2026, it hit a ceiling that had nothing to do with survival and everything to do with ambition, a valuation gap next to a rival twice its size that no amount of operational discipline could close overnight.

That makes this less of a growth-to-IPO story and more of a scale-versus-market-appetite one. Whether Curefoods closes that gap in a 2027 listing or keeps building privately in the meantime is the part still being written. For a look at how other Indian consumer brands have handled similar scaling and funding decisions, see our breakdowns of Mokobara’s growth and the Whole Truth Foods case study.

 

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