We interviewed Carlos Rodríguez-Maribona, Director of Expansion at Keatz, a food delivery startup.
Carlos Rodríguez-Maribona, Keatz’s Expansion Director, visited us a week ago to explain how they have turned the food delivery platform business around . Instead of betting on another platform, they have decided to create specific products for them.
Keatz is a German ghost restaurant startup; kitchens designed solely to deliver food to homes through platforms such as Deliveroo, UberEats or Glovo.
After starting his professional career in the world of venture capital working for four years in the venture capital area of Axon Partners Group in Spain and India, Carlos started working as Director of Operations at Minube (a Spanish travel startup).
Carlos always liked catering and everything related to the new foodtech trend. One day, he had a conversation through Twitter with Joaquín Mencía, with whom he partnered to launch Keatz.
Keatz’s project is based on two premises that occur in the world of food delivery:
- There is a lot of competition on the shipping platform side (Glovo, JustEat, etc.) and their large investments in marketing make the demand grow exponentially.
- Traditional restaurants do not earn as much because their kitchens are sized to feed their dining room, and food delivery is sometimes presented as a problem. The margin left by food delivery is very low and sometimes the delivery drivers do not have room to wait.
From these premises arose the idea of making restaurants that are only dedicated to preparing food for home delivery. When they started looking for resources to start the idea, they met a German company that was already doing something similar. They came together and set up an international company, which raised 6 million euros in its first round of financing and in a second, they have obtained 12 million euros from a Russian fund for the definitive internationalization of the business.
The food delivery market
The world of food delivery has an estimated market of 110 million euros, with an annual growth of 18% and with a great social impact. In fact, in the United States they are starting to build houses without kitchens. Currently, only 5% of the volume of food delivery comes from ghost restaurants, but there are already traditional restaurants (such as Telepizza or Goiko Grill) that are creating this type of premises because they make the business more scalable due to:
- The costs of starting the restaurant are much lower.
- You don’t have to pay very high rents in attractive premises because the location is not so important. The kitchen should be in a good location, but it can be on a back street. The important thing is to be close to customers.
- Food is designed and made to be food at home. Both the format and the temperature are designed to improve the experience of the food sent.
The magic of Keatz is based on the operations in the kitchen, which are very measured, almost like an assembly line, to favor the speed of shipping.
In addition, this way of working allows them to create new restaurants, new food brands that allow them to adapt, or even predict, market preferences.
Keatz will continue to grow, with two new challenges ahead: improving its automation and building global brands.
Below, you can see the interview we did with Carlos:
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