How SupplyNote Helps Restaurants Boost Inventory and Supply Chain

When most startups are barely surviving in the times of pandemic, SupplyNote, a food and beverage supply-chain automation platform, is steadily growing in terms of revenue, team-size and client base. Last week, the Noida-based startup reached a client base of 1500 F&B outlets. In the current scenario where most restaurants are struggling to survive, SupplyNote’s solution is enabling them to cut down on the cost of operations by 8-10% and improve bottomline.

In an exclusive chat with CXOToday, Kushang Kumar, Co-founder & CEO, SupplyNote, owes the success of his company to its solid technology backbone and a strong vision. Claiming SupplyNote to be ‘India’s first SaaS-based e-commerce platform’ helping food businesses to scale, he says, “With SupplyNote, F&B players can manage inventory, digitize their data and optimize their supply chain. All this together makes it an end-to end solution for any food business.

The SaaS-based startup was founded by four IIT Kanpur graduates with Kushang as CEO and co-founders Abhishek Verma as COO, Nitin Prakash as CPO and Harshit Mittal as CTO. The foursome first met at the IIT campus in 2011 and started their entrepreneurial journey right after graduation in 2015.

Working closely with restaurant outlets on special projects helped them discover the bigger challenges that these businesses face. Kushang says, “These outlets continue to rely on pen and paper for tracking and managing their inventory. This leads to human errors and there’s no digital track of consumption.”

“The other challenge is to procure inventory at the better cost,” he continues. “For a restaurant, to manage all of these in offline mode is a cumbersome task. These players can save enormously by automating the processes. At SupplyNote we help them digitize the entire inventory management, digital ordering and procurement procedure. This in turn helps them in optimizing their processes save costs and increase profitability.”

SupplyNote provides a Cloud based web and mobile enabled suite connecting restaurant outlets, service providers and suppliers, as Kumar explains, the company provides an easy-to-use and comprehensive dashboard to restaurants for the management of inventory and tracking data-metrics.

“It also connects F&B businesses with suppliers, while making the processes of communicating and transacting easier for both the businesses and their suppliers,” he says.

Riding on technologies such as cloud and analytics, SupplyNote has been observing a steady growth despite the pandemic. With a 70% month-on-month growth for the year of 2020-21, SupplyNote has been tirelessly working towards automating the way food and beverage outlets managed operations, as Kushang mentions, “On an average, we have seen 150% year-on-year growth since our inception.”

“Our goal is a simple one – we want our clients, the F&B businesses to be able to manage their back-end processes better and make better choices with data. Our platform’s development will be aligned to that vision. We are also adding more suppliers and products on our platforms so that it’s easier to procure goods. The idea is to widen the portfolio and make technology seamless,” informs Kushang.

The startup raised a $600k bridge round from several investors till date the founders have raised $1.6 million till date. While the F&B sector can be classified into organized and unorganized segments, SupplyNote is targeting the organized group comprising chain restaurants and standalone restaurants. Kushang believes that with a paradigm shift in these types of restaurants in India that needs a standardization of processes, SupplyNote sees a world of potential to scale these businesses.

A Statista report notes that India’s food and beverages industry is projected to record revenue of $7.6 billion in 2021. The revenue is expected to grow over 10% annually, resulting in an optimistic projected market volume of $11.3 billion by 2025.

Speaking about the company’s future plans, Kushang says, “We are targeting a $100 million worth of transaction volume in next two years. We will be focussing on nurturing our channels to engage with more and more customers for next 12-18 months.”

“We are also actively hiring and will continue to add more features to the platform to offer even more superior customer experience,” he sums up.