Are cloud kitchens and delivery the future of India's food industry?

Cloud kitchens are essentially low-cost models where kitchens in places with cheap real estate are rented out, and from which deliveries are fulfilled mostly through an aggregator.

The doors have reopened and the tables laid — albeit six feet apart— but there are no guests. In a raging pandemic that affords no room for either revelry or quiet dining, restaurants, ordinarily sites of cool conviviality, are now cold, empty, arid shells.

The restaurant industry has been one of the biggest casualties of the coronavirus crisis worldwide. But in India, where the food service sector employs over seven million people and is estimated to be worth Rs 4.2 lakh crore, the distress has been particularly acute. For one, the lockdown here was among the longest and most stringent