Foodology’s cloud kitchen concept gains foothold across Latin America
Summary
Cloud kitchens became popular during the global pandemic as a way for restaurants to reach their communities when people were not going out as much.One of those was Foodology, a Colombia-based cloud kitchen and virtual restaurant company, co-founded by Daniela Izquierdo and Juan Guillermo Azuero in 2019.Unlike other kitchen groups that bring in existing restaurants, Foodology specializes in creating brands from scratch, then operating and scaling them quickly to profitability. They do this by collecting data on geography and what consumers like and then creating original dishes with delivery.In this region, we have a very fragmented market, Izquierdo told TechCrunch. Here, we have a lot of smaller players, especially in categories like traditional food.When I spoke with the co-founders in 2021, they had just raised $15 million in Series A funding and were operating about 20 locations in Colombia and Mexico. They saw an average of 100,000 orders per month in Colombia and had about 360 employees.Today, the company is also in Peru and Brazil, having launched in those markets in March. Meanwhile, the debt was provided by TriplePoint Capital.In the last 12 months, Foodology expanded to 83 locations and is poised to be around 100 by the end of the year, Azuero told TechCrunch.