Over the past decade, Kouzina Food Tech has established itself as a powerhouse in India’s food and beverage industry. Starting in 2013 with a focus on running franchise outlets for other brands, the company soon pivoted to launching its own virtual restaurant brands, including WarmOven, KaatiZone, and CupCake Bliss. Today, Kouzina operates a network of cloud kitchens across 90 cities, delivering freshly prepared meals and baked goods straight to customers’ doors. Their approach emphasizes innovation, quality, and accessibility—ensuring that high-quality food can be made fresh and delivered quickly.
Beyond food delivery, Kouzina has also introduced a disruptive franchising model that lowers the barrier to entry for aspiring entrepreneurs. By offering a streamlined, technology-driven system, the company provides partners with the resources they need to successfully run cloud kitchens without the heavy investment typically associated with traditional franchises. This unique model is transforming how food businesses scale and expand across India.
In an exclusive email interview with our social reporter, Tara, Kouzina Food Tech’s CEO, Mahesh Madiyala, shares insights into the company’s journey, its success with WarmOven’s fresh cake delivery model, and how their innovative approach is reshaping India’s food-tech landscape.
Tara: Starting a bakery that delivers fresh cakes within two hours is quite ambitious. What inspired you both to embark on this sweet journey with WarmOven?
Mahesh: 10 years ago, when we were running a cafe that also sold full cakes, we realized a trivial but deep insight. No one goes to a cake shop to cut a cake. Cake always travels to the party. Additionally, customers always found it inconvenient to go to a cake shop and then take the cake back to the party. We decided to solve this by delivering cakes to the customers location and in the process also making sure that the cake is baked and prepared just a couple of hours before the delivery time, so that it is always fresh! Customers loved the convenience and the fresh cakes. We started with one location in central Bangalore and within 5 years, we had grown to 10 locations across Bangalore.
Mahesh: Our culinary experts keep on top of the latest trends around and we add them to our offerings. However, these days, people want customized cakes with specific themes that are relevant for the recipient. Customers (mostly mom’s) have a detailed discussions with our chefs on what is that they want in the theme cake, be it the color, design, flavor, figurines etc and our chefs prepare that accordingly. In fact, we share a picture preview with customers, so that if there are final touches required, chefs make those changes before the cake is dispatched to the party.
Mahesh: In a world where customers want it NOW, we have internally designed operations to suit this need. We have the cake sponges baked and ready and once the order is confirmed, our chefs get on to the job of finishing the cake as per the customers need. And then our delivery executives, with specially equipped delivery bags to minimize damages, take care of delivering the orders to the customers.
Mahesh: You will be surprised by the number of “Adult themed cakes” being ordered by people for their friends. Customers hesitate to talk about what they really require, so our chefs have learnt to share some pictures of cakes made previously and then start with the customization!
Mahesh: While everyone has a lot of ideas, it is critical to find out if customers actually are ready to pay for your products and convenience of home delivery. In food, it is very easy to start small, run trials and get feedback and once customers love the products, scale it up. And here we mean feedback from real customers and not friends and family. This has helped us to scale our businesses to more than 250+ locations across 90 cities in India. We run our own bakeries and also help other entrepreneurs who want to get into this business by helping set up franchisees.
Warmoven is run by first generation entrepreneurs and want to help others succeed. If any of our readers want to set up food businesses anywhere in India, do talk to them at www.kftpl.com