My takeaways from the many conversations I have had with restaurateurs, cloud kitchen operators and home chefs can be compressed into these bullet points:

• Restaurants and cloud kitchens receive delivery/takeaway orders from disparate sources: phone-ins by loyal customers, or WhatsApp messages; walk-ins; their own proprietory websites; the big aggregators; and emerging technology solution providers, which have gathered momentum as a result of the National Restaurant Association of India’s #OrderDirect movement. The challenge is to integrate these multiple orders from multiple sources on one PoS and to transmit them seamlessly to the production end through one Kitchen Display System, which must also have the capability to time each order.
• Food delivery players not only are denied access to customer data (a sore point between the NRAI and the big aggregators who control access to 85 per cent of the business), but also have no automated system to manage their diner database or to record and measure customer feedback.
• Dine-in restaurants, which first navigated the delivery route to keep themselves afloat during the 2020 national lockdown, have realised that they have to keep a delivery