Right from the onset of the pandemic, our entire team at Hashtag Loyalty was focussed on one objective, "how do we help our merchants to not only survive but also thrive?".
In answer to that, we first introduced Save Local, a gift card platform to help businesses with immediate cashflow. And, in just months into lockdown we launched Thrive, an online food ordering system for restaurants to accept orders directly from their customers. But, little did we know that a year later we would've launched an #OrderDirect listing page to tackle aggregators and help customers find and order food from restaurants directly delivering to them.
Just recently, despite the torrid second wave of the pandemic we find ourselves in, we touched a key milestone of successfully listing 1000 of our active restaurant partners on our Order Direct page. And we're elated to see this number rise exponentially as we continue to receive restaurant sign-ups and customer orders from all across the country!
Today, we stand at the cusp of a highly spoken about, eagerly anticipated and much needed revolution in the Indian food-tech ecosystem. There is an urgent need for a fair alternate platform to challenge the aggregator duopoly and restore balance in the hospitality industry. And, we're proud that Thrive and our listing page more than fulfils this requirement and present themselves as the way forward for restaurants across India.
One of our trusted partners Gauri Devidayal, Owner and CEO of The Table and Food Matters India Pvt. Ltd., a big advocate of this cause and has been in constant touch with us about it and a lot of credit goes to her for pushing us!
The Indian food-tech ecosystem is dangerously lopsided and wrongly driven by the money driven duopoly, Zomato & Swiggy, that are feeding off and exploiting the very restaurants that make the foundation of their platforms. For every order placed by customers through their applications, restaurants are forced to pay up to 30% of their revenues in the name of finder fees/ commission to these aggregators, while also note retaining any access let alone ownership of their customer data. With solely their own interests in mind, the aggregators have taken upon themselves to decide norms unilaterally for all F&B businesses, which has led to the threatening of the very existence of restaurants across the country.
Thrive is our effort to help restaurants become self-sufficient and independent of aggregators by implementing their own online food ordering and delivery systems. It is our endeavour at enabling restaurants to take back control of their business' destinies and restoring an equal status quo in the industry.
Thrive has been open to use for restauranteurs since July, 2020, and we have updated our product and expanded our solution by leaps and bounds. Since then over 1700 restaurants have adopted Thrive solution and have collectively saved a total of Rs. 1.5 Cr in commission fees that they would've otherwise paid to Zomato & Swiggy. This success has been achieved at brands of the likes of Americano, Izumi, The Table, Magnolia Bakery, Natural Ice Creams, Apsara Ice Creams, The Bombay Canteen, O Pedro, and many more restaurants across India.
We recently launched a first of it's kind in the country, a self-serve/ DIY platform for Thrive, that allows restaurants pan-India to setup their own online ordering websites in less than 5 minutes! Check it out here: thrivenow.in/signup
Not only this, to generate better value for our customers i.e. restauranteurs and to strengthen the #OrderDirect movement we launched a listing page, another first in India, a website where customers can find & order food from restaurants directly delivering to them! Visit: thrivenow.in/order
Watch Karan Chechani, Co-founder and CMO at Thrive deliver the complete announcement here: https://youtu.be/zfCdDqXj1Bg
We've come this far, and we don't intend to slow down. In the coming year, we aim to empower 10,000 restaurants to employ Thrive and reduce their dependency on aggregators. We've got clear vision, the right focus and owing to our strong background with Hashtag Loyalty, we've gained unparalleled expertise about restaurants, their business and their challenges, which we look to solve using our technological adeptness.
Ending this note with a quote borrowed from Megan Murphy and Alex Jost of Hotjar, which seems to aptly relevant for Thrive and it's solution for restaurants:
If you’re serious about cooking, you don’t want a swiss army knife in your kitchen. You want a proper set of kitchen knives.
To put it simply, this principle applies to software tools as well, and that's how we're approaching the building of Thrive - we're putting together the sharpest set of kitchen knives for our restaurant partners.