Rebel Foods and Curefoods together did ₹2,868 crore of revenue in FY26. They also lost ₹474 crore.

Rebel is further ahead. Revenue grew 21% to ₹1,952 crore while losses fell 16% to ₹282 crore. Curefoods grew 23% to ₹916 crore, but losses increased to ₹192 crore. Both are getting some benefit from scale, just not enough to make the model comfortable yet.

The deeper problem is customer ownership.

Rebel spent ₹318 crore on commissions and brokerage and another ₹194 crore on advertising. Curefoods spent ₹167 crore and ₹79 crore respectively. In both cases, commissions and advertising consumed about 26% of operating revenue.

Cloud kitchens were supposed to save money by removing expensive storefronts, dining areas and front-of-house staff. Instead, part of the rent simply moved online. Restaurants once paid landlords for customers walking past the store. Cloud kitchens pay Zomato, Swiggy and digital advertising platforms for customers scrolling past them.

Domino’s shows why delivery itself is not the problem. Nearly 73% of its India revenue came from delivery in Q1 FY26, yet Jubilant FoodWorks was producing about 12% pre-Ind AS EBITDA margins. Domino’s also had 14.7 million monthly active users on its own app. It owns far more of the customer relationship.

Curefoods still gets roughly 72% of demand through aggregators. Moving some customers to direct ordering will help, but it will not fix everything. Shifting 10% of FY26 sales to a cheaper direct channel might improve EBITDA by roughly ₹9 crore under generous assumptions. Its FY26 EBITDA loss was ₹69 crore.

Curefoods therefore needs better kitchen utilisation, lower overhead and stronger brands. Its own numbers already show where the business is moving. EatFit revenue fell, while Sharief Bhai, Olio Pizza and Nomad Pizza grew sharply. Healthy food may have been the original pitch, but pizza, biryani and desserts appear to produce stronger demand.

There is another contradiction. Curefoods started as a cloud-kitchen company, yet it now operates restaurants and kiosks alongside 281 cloud kitchens. Depreciation reached ₹101 crore, about 11% of revenue. The asset-light model is becoming more physical because stores can also work as billboards and customer-acquisition channels.

EatClub offers an uncomfortable comparison. It did about ₹750 crore of FY25 revenue with a net loss of only ₹14.6 crore. Curefoods did ₹746 crore and lost ₹170 crore.

That gap matters more than kitchen count or brand count.

For food startups, the useful question now is simpler: how much outside capital was needed to create ₹1 of sustainable restaurant revenue?

Cloud kitchens solved the cost of opening a restaurant. They did not solve the cost of creating repeat demand. That is still the business.

Let’s go through what else is happening in Indian startup world - Grab your simmering cup of StartupChai.in and unwind with our hand-brewed memes.

Pocket FM is eyeing a 15%-20% EBITDA margin as AI cuts content production costs.

With 90% of production now AI-powered, it plans to expand into Japan and South Korea.

Read more here

L’Oréal has selected 13 startups for its second L’AcceleratOR cohort, including two from India.

Backed by a €100 Mn fund, the program focuses on climate, nature and circularity innovations.

Read more here

OTPless has named cofounder Satyam Nathani as CEO as Bhavik Koladiya steps away.

The identity startup says it has turned profitable, with ₹36 Cr in annualized revenue.

Read more here

Odisha is planning an 870-acre ‘Silicon Valley’ between Cuttack and Bhubaneswar to attract semiconductor companies.

The state has also approved five chip projects worth ₹11,000 Cr.

Read more here

Unstop has acquired talent-assessment platform PerspectAI, with the acquired company’s founders and team set to join Unstop.

PerspectAI brings AI-powered and game-based assessment capabilities to Unstop’s hiring platform.

Read more here