‘House of brands’ is a phrase you would immediately associate with the likes of fast-moving consumer products giant Unilever. The roll-up model - popularised by the American startup Thrasio - involves gobbling up small sellers of a range of products on marketplaces such as Amazon and scaling them, taking advantage of the economies of scale.
But, there’s another business to which both these phrases increasingly apply. Building a cloud kitchen company necessarily means having multiple brands in your kitty. Rebel Foods, best known for Behrouz Biryani, has managed to notch up a valuation of $1.4 billion thanks to its 45 brands, most of them built organically.
But The Nagori is readying a challenger, not by building brands patiently from scratch but by buying small and promising ones.
The 36-year-old former chief business officer of e-commerce giant Flipkart and co-founder of fitness startup CureFit has been on a tear with Curefoods, the company he set up in late 2020. Curefoods—which has raised $146 million in equity and debt—has over 20 brands. All but three of those were acquired.
Nagori has no interest in these brands being like musicians who are great on their own but out of sync in a band. "If you are a large gourmet brand that makes the best pasta, but the process cannot be integrated into our kitchens, we will not acquire them,” he added
But deriving synergies from these brands is not Nagori's only challenge, as The MMS writes in their well-argued and insightful article. "You need to be able to integrate these businesses, as well as manage different founding teams. It's a very different set of challenges in front of Curefoods, as compared to Rebel Foods,” says an investor in both companies.
Nagori wants to do with Curefoods what he couldn't with Eat.fit, Curefit’s healthy food brand, due, in part, to the pandemic. And he certainly doesn't lack for ambition
