Is Rising Takeout Demand Pushing Off-Premise Sale in Restaurants

The food market is changing at an accelerated pace and for leading players in the category, going online is sacrosanct to expand consumer base and thereby revenues. Time-starved and convenience-seeking consumers particularly millennials are showing a great appetite for having food delivered at home, workplace and other convenient spots. Food technology and food service solution companies have majorly contributed to this trend. 

“Witnessing the growing demand for online delivery, LBF also forayed into cloud kitchen recently and we have received phenomenal response on the same in a short span of time. While we will continue to expand our offline stores, online delivery will be a focus area as well,” shared Rohit Aggarwal, Director Lite Bite Foods by adding that their flagship brand Punjab Grill is the top performing brand in terms of sales generated from takeout and delivery orders.

Also, Many times it happens that a customer has to roam in the market looking for a parking space which irritates him and he ends by either not going to the restaurant or opting for a home delivery. Everybody in today's time wants things to happen on the go. They prefer to get the order packed and have it at home comfortably. Hence, more and more restaurants are entering into the food delivery or cloud kitchen space.

Hitting on Millenials

Though there is no specific age bracket for takeaway orders or people prefer to pick the food while on-the-go but demand for such orders are high among young crowd and families that have working members. “Earlier only younger generation preferred take away as they can have it while they are driving or may be sit at a friend's place and enjoy the meal. But now what we see is that the age group for takeout is between 17-55 years,” said Kartik Aggarwal, Owner Bhalla King that does takeaway orders ranging from Rs 400-500.

On the other hand, brands like Lite Bite Foods, Massive Restaurants that are targeting on young generations are seeing more such crowd picking orders at their takeaway joints. “Our patrons, who order online are mostly above the age of 24 years with adequate disposable incomes,” added Aggarwal whose restaurant gets an order of price ranging between Rs.1000 – 1500 per order.

Rise of Online-aggregators

Zomato, Swiggy, UberEats and the likes have disrupted the dining out market with more and more people opting deliveries and takeaways. These players are also enticing customers with offers and discounts that is pushing off-premise sale of the restaurants and thus inviting more young crowds and millenials to get the food delivered at home instead of visiting a restaurant. Also, more and more people are now preferring online table reservation if dining out which is giving them a hassle-free entry into their favourite restaurant. “Zomato launched the table reservation platform in 2016 and today, Zomato is one of the largest processor of table reservations in India. In 2018, 10.5 million diners booked tables online on Zomato. The company currently receives almost a million reservations a month,” shared a press statement by the online reservation and aggregator platform. “The company experienced a 60% growth in the number of restaurants accepting online table reservations through its platform in 2018, which created more opportunities for users to reserve tables online and resulted in an incredible 3.5x growth in the number of bookings from the previous year,” it added.