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Luxury Brand Gucci Forays Into Restaurant Business Luxury labels are accustomed to tempting fashionistas, and now they're stretching from haute couture to haute cuisine. Gucci opened a 50-seat restaurant, Gucci Osteria, in Florence where three-Michelin-star chef Massimo Bottura will serve up high-end dishes. The Italian fashion house, owned by Kering, is not the only luxury company to foray into food; LVMH announced late last year it would open a second branch of its gourmet grocer La Grande Epicerie in Paris, days before Tiffany's & Co opened its Blue Box Cafe in New York. Gucci and its rivals do not expect these investments to yield significant financial returns, for now, but they are seen as a way of enhancing their global brands. In some cases, eateries can also be a way to make the most out of large, city-centre store sites as customers increasingly shop online. The Gucci Osteria restaurant is part of "Gucci Garden", which includes an exhibition

Momo Giant Wow! Momo Signs MoU With Bengal Government Coming as a big boost in the food and beverages sector, the state government has signed two MoUs with M omo giant Wow! Momo and Specialty Group of Restaurants at the Bengal Global Business Summit, with the former planning to open a chain of Bengali cuisine restaurant and the latter to set up a hospitality training academy in Rajarhat by this year. City-based Wow! Momo, which started with a single store inside Spencers in 2008 and now boasts of having 150 plus outlets across India, signed the MoU with the state fisheries department where the government promised to provide them with best quality raw materials at cheapest possible price. “We are planning to start a pan-India c hain of Bengali cuisine restaurant. As per the deal, the government has assured us complete support. We will get the best quality fish, chicken and prawn directly from the fishermen without any middleman. The cost of raw materials is expected to be 6

Health-Tech Start-Up eKincare Secures Series A Funding Hyderabad-based eKincare, India’s first integrated healthcare benefits platform driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI), has announced today that they have secured an undisclosed amount of Series A funding. The investors involved in the round include Ventureast, Endiya Partners, Eight Roads, Bitkemy Ventures, and Padma Shri BVR Mohan Reddy. eKincare’s AI powered personal health assistant reads medical data from health records and various healthcare interventions, predict health risks and provide timely personalized recommendations to beat those risks.All one has to do is take pictures of the physical medical records and eKincare will do the rest; it’s as easy as taking a selfie! Trusted by fortune 500 companies, like Optum, Unilever, Barclays and Disney among others, eKincare today has strategic partners in over 2000 locations across India.As India’s only end-to-end integrated healthcare solution, with the ability to

Gourmet Investments Ties Up with Sri Lankan Sea Food Restaurant Gourmet Investments, promoted by the Bharti Family Office has tied up with Ministry of Crab, owned by cricketers Kumara Sangakarra, Mahela Jayawardene and Chef Dharshan Munidasa to bring the iconic Sri Lankan seafood restaurant to the country. Gourmet Investments CEO Ramit Mittal said “The first outpost of Ministry of Crab will open in Mumbai in May-June 2018, with an investment of Rs 4-5 crore. We are pleased to start our journey in Mumbai. We are planning to bring globally acclaimed dining brands as well as celebrity chefs to India to an audience that travels extensively and is more aware about pedigree international food trends”. Gourmet Investments COO Deepinder Bhatt said “By the end of 2018, the company plans to indigenously develop and acquire rights for multiple global food and beverage brands, with the next one being Typhoon Shelter conceptualised with Chef Christian Yang”.

HungerBox Bags $2.5 Million Fund In Pre-Series A Funding Bengaluru-based HungerBox, a B2B food-tech company, on Monday announced closing of $ $2.5 million in pre-series A funding led by Lionrock Capital and Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan. Started in 2016, HungerBox is a full stack, foodtech company that is focussed on the B2B space and operates over 100 digital cafeterias for more than 75 corporate clients, including Qualcomm, Microsoft, FirstSource, Accenture, Capgemini, Genpact, ABB, Amazon and McKinsey in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi/NCR and Jaipur. “HungerBox’s business has scaled tremendously over the last 15 months with nearly seven million orders placed on our platform till date. We are clocking more than 120,000 daily orders and expect to scale this to half a million orders per day by end-2018,” Shared Sandipan Mitra, CEO and co-founder, HungerBox.