Brands
Rebel Foods serves Easybites a faster route to multi city growth
MUMBAI: When scaling a food brand feels like juggling flaming pans, Rebel Foods is offering a cooler, faster flame. Through its brand growth platform Rebel Launcher, the cloud kitchen major has teamed up with Easybites to help the young, fast-growing brand expand across key Indian markets.
As part of the partnership, Easybites is now live across ten Rebel Foods cloud kitchens in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. The rollout is only the starter course. The brand plans to enter Chennai and add more locations over the coming months, using Rebel Launcher’s infrastructure to scale quickly without the usual operational drag.
Easybites has built early traction with a tight, delivery-friendly menu centred on fried chicken, burgers and wraps, leaning into flavour-forward comfort food designed for consistency at scale. By plugging into Rebel Launcher, the brand can enter multiple neighbourhoods in a city from day one, while using data-led insights to fine-tune performance without compromising on quality or brand identity.
Rebel Foods co-founder Ankur Sharma said the collaboration reflects the company’s ambition to create a shared growth ecosystem for food brands. He noted that Rebel Launcher is designed to help partners expand efficiently across geographies by leveraging Rebel Foods’ technology, infrastructure and operational depth.
Easybites CEO Masoud Mohamed described Rebel Launcher as a key enabler in the brand’s southern expansion. He said the platform allows Easybites to understand new markets faster and reach more consumers per city from the outset, adding that the partnership is seen as a long-term strategic alliance.
Rebel Launcher positions itself as a lower-capex, faster go-to-market alternative for restaurant brands, handling kitchens, supply chain and operations while letting partners focus on food and brand-building. The Easybites tie-up adds to a growing roster of partners already using the platform, including Natural’s Ice Cream, ITC, Taco Bell, Wow! Momo, Biryani Blues, Smoor, Parsi Dairy Farm, Daryaganj, Chaipoint and several others.
As India’s food delivery landscape grows more crowded, the Rebel Foods–Easybites partnership underlines a simple idea: in the race to scale, sometimes the smartest move is sharing the kitchen.
Brands
Dunkin’ Donuts to exit India as Jubilant FoodWorks ends 15-year franchise deal
The quick service restaurant giant is ending a 15-year franchise partnership with the American doughnut chain, even as it renews its Domino’s agreement for another 15 years
NOIDA: Dunkin’ is done in India. Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd, the country’s leading quick service restaurant operator, has decided not to renew its franchise agreement with the American coffee and doughnut chain, and will wind down its Indian stores in a phased manner before December 31, 2026, bringing a 15-year partnership to a quiet, loss-laden close.
The decision, approved by JFL’s board on March 30, 2026, ends a relationship that began with a Multiple Unit Development Franchise Agreement signed on February 24, 2011. JFL will now evaluate and undertake what it described in a regulatory filing as the “rationalisation and/or cessation of certain operations and/or sale, transfer or disposal of assets and/or assignment or transfer of franchise rights,” all in consultation with Dunkin’s brand owners and strictly within the terms of the original agreement.
The numbers tell the story bluntly. In the financial year 2024-25, Dunkin’ India posted a revenue of Rs 37 crore against a loss of Rs 19 crore — a haemorrhage that was always going to test the patience of a parent company recording revenues of Rs 6,104 crore and a profit of Rs 194 crore in the same period. Doughnuts, it turns out, were never going to move the needle.
The contrast with JFL’s handling of its other marquee franchise could hardly be sharper. Even as it walks away from Dunkin’, the company has just doubled down on Domino’s, signing a fresh Master Franchise Agreement on March 31, 2026, granting it exclusive rights to develop and operate Domino’s Pizza stores in India for 15 years, with an option to renew for a further 10.
JFL, incorporated in 1995 and promoted by the Bharatia family, operates a network of more than 3,500 stores across six markets — India, Turkey, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Its portfolio includes Domino’s and Popeyes on the global side, and two home-grown brands: Hong’s Kitchen and COFFY, a café brand in Turkey.
For Dunkin’, India was always a stretch. The brand never quite cracked the cultural code in a market where filter coffee and chai command fierce loyalty and where the doughnut remains, at best, an occasional indulgence rather than a daily habit. Fifteen years, mounting losses and a parent with better things to spend its capital on was always going to be a difficult equation to solve.
The doughnut has had its last day. The pizza, however, is staying.
