Reinventing food franchising: Why we invested in Kbox Global

The last few years have seen an acceleration in food delivery — there are more delivery networks (eg in the UK from only Just Eat in wave 1, to the additions of Deliveroo and Uber Eats in wave 2), more food outlets connected to these networks and consequently a healthy growth in consumer budgets going to delivered pre-prepared food. The last 6 months of lockdown has only served to speed this up further.

Initially the food delivery ecosystem connected dine-in or takeaway restaurants (from quick-service fast food to high-end eateries) to the delivery network in order to get food from restaurant to consumer. In the last few years various efforts have begun to set up “ghost” kitchens which make meals for delivery, i.e. they have no front-of-house dining space. This makes sense as these kitchens can be set up close to demand and have varied menus to meet the needs of different customers. But it requires finding space (not always easy to find near demand), fitting out a kitchen, devising menus, etc. and so is not very scaleable.

Overlooked in all of this was all of the other kitchen locations where food is being prepared — pubs, hotels, retail spaces, and so on. There are 100,000+ of these kitchens in the UK alone. These kitchens are rarely fully utilised/monetised and often have menus which work well for their patrons but may not be suitable for delivery customers. Enter Kbox Global. Set up by the exceptional Salima Vellani, Kbox has created a truly modern approach to building a franchise business in order to solve this problem. Kbox licenses food brands, menus, and workflow software to these businesses and integrates into their POS, connects them with the delivery networks and helps them with marketing. Overnight, a hotel, for example, can light up a suite of delivery only food brands and start earning incremental revenue. It requires no additional equipment and usually no extra personnel. This is possible by taking a software-centric approach to the franchising — remote training tools, workflow, order management, etc. Kbox also constantly monitors kitchen performance, food demand trends and develops new menus which can be A/B tested and rolled out.

Today, Balderton announced we had led a £12m investment round to help Kbox move at the speed the market is demanding. We are delighted to be working with Salima and the team on this.