“15% of restaurants in the United States already work with virtual brands, while in Europe the percentage is only 1%, so there is a lot of room for growth,” says Max Porta, co-founder of Cloudtown Brands. Porta refers to take-out companies that use the kitchens of already existing restaurants so that the owners can get more out of their stoves, taking advantage of the boom in food delivery that emerged after the covid.
Promoting takeaway food brands is what Cloudtown Brands, a Barcelona startup cooked up during the pandemic, is dedicated to. "The idea came before, but the confinement allowed us to calmly get on with the project," recalls Miguel Ron, another of the entrepreneurs behind this start-up company. Chef Juan Andrés Lattuf, co-founder of Chivuo's hamburger restaurants, completes the entrepreneurial trio of this company born in July 2020.
Cloudtown Brands works with more than a hundred restaurants distributed throughout the country's geography. They offer to cook for one of the nearly 20 brands they manage. Among these, it is worth noting Chivuo's, Milanesa Haus, Van Van Chicken, Dos Coyotes, Deep Pizza, Orimaki Sushi or Koreans do it better and, thanks to the vegan food firm Heura, they have just launched Dirty Joe's. These are both new brands created by Cloudtown and already existing firms that have been integrated. The choice and construction of brands is not accidental, but is based on the study of market preferences.
In parallel, the company has developed its own software that manages and automates all the processes involved in the home delivery service and that facilitates the optimization of the channel. This point is key with regard to the scalability of the model and to know which gastronomic proposals work best in each area.
With headquarters in Barcelona and a team of 30 people, Cloudtown Brands has started to operate this year in France and Italy. With the desire to grow more quickly, the entrepreneurs want to launch a second round of financing, which would be added to the 1.5 million euros raised in a seed round, and the 2.2 million euros obtained at the beginning of 2022. They have set a goal of reaching a turnover of 10 million euros this year, reaching 300 restaurants in Spain and gaining a place at the tables in Portugal, Germany and the United Kingdom. In 2022, the turnover was 3.5 million euros.
