One Kitchen, Hundreds of Internet Restaurants

Since the start of the pandemic, the number of cloud kitchens has exploded in the country. Many of the restaurants I see on Swiggy and Zomato these days are cloud kitchens. They can even manage multiple restaurant brands on meal ordering platforms from the same kitchen.

For example, Rebel Foods, a cloud kitchen company, owns and operates 11 different cloud kitchen brands like Faasos, Behrouz Biryani, Oven Story, etc. All from one location.

But there are a few cloud kitchen restaurants that deliver such crappy food that I want to know what other brands are run by the same kitchen so I can avoid them all. This information is not visible on Swiggy or Zomato.

One way to do this is to check the restaurant's FSSAI license number. It is listed at the bottom of the restaurant's menu listing on Swiggy and Zomato. If it is the same for different restaurants, the food is from the same kitchen.

However, it is impractical to manually check all restaurant listings and know which and how many of them operate from the same kitchen. I needed a way to find them all.

So I searched and found some restaurant datasets in Bangalore for Swiggy and Zomato on Kaggle. I then wrote a small script to obtain the FSSAI license no. and the lat/long of each of these restaurants. Both publicly available information.

I was doing this to find and avoid restaurant brands I don't like on Swiggy and Zomato. But while analyzing the FSSAI license data of these restaurants, I found something very, very weird.

Check this line chart of no. restaurant brands sharing the same FSSAI license number. on Swiggy.