COVID19 CASTS A ‘PALL OF GLOOM’ ON INDIAN FOOD STARTUPS

The pandemic COVID-19 has devoured major business across the globe. Some of the prominent sectors including food industry have also been affected by the virus, which resulted in salary cuts, lack of investment, scrutinizing the work force and most importantly, massive reductions in revenues. The startup sector, which was given a grand flag off by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2016 with Rs 10,000 crore corpus to fund this growing industry has now been going through a very tough time. In January and February 2020, VCs invested more in Indian startups compared to the same period last year. On January 30, India registered its first case of coronavirus but it wasn’t till the second half of March that the government started going into overdrive to contain the virus. That’s when Indian startups got busy measuring their runway’, the number of months they could survive without funding, and updating their pitch decks for more
funding. The layoffs followed at Ola, Uber, Swiggy, Zomato, Paytm, Paisa Bazaar. NuFFooDS Spectrum measures the impairment caused by COVID-19 to India’s food startup business by taking inputs from the young budding entrepreneurs who are associated with this sector.