May 2, 2023

Credit: Thinkstock Fruveggie Tech Pvt Ltd, which runs foodtech firm Pluckk, on Tuesday said it has bought meal kit brand Kook for $1.3 million (around Rs 10 crore) in a mix of cash and equity deal. With this acquisition, Pluckk seeks to drive its market growth with foray into meal kit space. Co-founded by Pratik Gupta in 2021, Pluckk claims to be a first-of-its-kind digital lifestyle-oriented fresh food brand in fruits and vegetables market. It offers a large variety of special selections of gourmet fruits and vegetables directly to end consumers. The platform has already on boarded over 500 farmers across Mumbai and Bengaluru and plans to hit 1,000-mark in the next six months. Kook was founded by Nikhil Thatai and Arpitta Jerath in 2020. It was started with a mission to make at home cooking hassle free and easy. Kook meal kits enable people to make a perfect meal from start to finish at home within 20 minutes. In the post-covid world, ready to cook meal kits have emerged as a sought after cooking trend with customers preferring to control the quality of food consumed while having more dining options which we look to leverage by offering this differentiator to our customer experience,” said Nelson D’Souza, chief financial officer at Pluckk. “We estimate the market size of meal kits to be around $1 billion by 2025 in India and we look forward to leveraging our expertise in meal kit delivery to offer healthy and delicious meal options to cater to this booming market in our country," said Thatai. In January last year, Pluckk raised $5 million seed capital from Exponentia Ventures , a fund focussed on emerging business ideas in both B2C and B2B space.