Our guest today is Sandipan Mitra, co-founder and CEO of HungerBox, his second venture in the food-tech scene. In this conversation, Mitra talks about persevering through Covid-19, and the long-term vision for the company—which has raised $16.5 million in funding so far—offering both a food tech SaaS platform and a food operations management service.

(00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation

(01:00) Our guest today — Sandipan Mitra, co-founder and CEO, HungerBox

(01:32) The journey to HungerBox — building and exiting hungrybangalore.com, for a decade, a consumer-facing web service

(03:35) Early days of Hungry Bangalore — a solution that couldn’t beat ordering over the phone

(05:30) Inflexion point — ending 2014 as an app company

(06:15) The problem/opportunity that HungerBox started with — institutional food service. Building a digital cafeteria solution

(08:30) Going from 2016 to 2019 — getting the eight out of the 10 largest private sector employers in the country to use HungerBox

(09:23) The scale of operations just before Covid struck — 1.2 million registered users

(10:25) The problems that HungerBox was solving for different stakeholders

(18:20) Repercussions of Covid

(20:00) Anticipating a bounce-back after the third wave, and being better prepared

(21:00) The biggest evolution at HungerBox — going beyond corporate businesses to multiple sectors: “Covid opened our eyes”

(24:35) Using tech to find the right value of food delivered — choice, nutrition, price and so on.

(25:40) Growing the business on two fronts — pure tech provider on the SaaS model and offering a food operations and cafeteria management service

(30:35) Funding, investors and plans

Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds