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Travis Kalanick, the cofounder and former CEO of Uber, has a startling warning for those planning to run cloud kitchens in India: don’t.
In conversation with investor Peter Diamandis at the 2025 Moonshot Summit, the former Uber chief executive confessed he went into markets he shouldn’t have. “We went to some places we shouldn’t have gone. Just so happens, you can’t make money on [cloud] kitchens in India… don’t go to Indonesia, don’t go to India, don’t go to Colombia, those are the main ones.”
Kalanick’s dark kitchen venture, CloudKitchens, began as its India foray KitchenPlus in 2019. It used to run six centres across Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru, providing commercial kitchen services to other restaurants, including marquee names like Theobroma and Mamagoto. It had to close down in 2023, though due to unsustainable revenue growth. Reports suggest that rentals and utilities offered by the Kalanick’s KitchenPlus were way higher than the industry average.
Uber Eats, the food delivery business by Uber, was acquired by Zomato in 2020. Uber had acquired 9.99% stake in Zomato as part of the deal. However, Kalanick was not at the helm of Uber during this time.
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However, cloud kitchens have been growing in popularity across the nation. Sharing infrastructure to cut costs and maximise kitchen utilisation, allows these dark kitchens to scale rapidly, with many achieving Rs 100 crore in revenue within two to three years, a Redseer report noted. India’s food market was valued at $80 billion in 2024, with compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) projected to be 10–11% through 2030, according to consultancy.
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Let ‘them’ cookKalanick said cloud kitchens can help people get their time back and do other things they love.
“The idea about cloud kitchens is can you get a meal that is prepared and delivered to you so high quality and so cost efficient and so convenient that it is approaching the cost of going to the of you going to the grocery store… what you get in return for this is you basically get your time back to do all the other things in life you love and cook when you want,” the former Uber CEO said.
On AI changing the way cloud kitchen function, Kalanick said a whole other set of models will have to be invented for a real world application, calling it a “different ballgame”.
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