His startup was acquired by Ovo. Now, he wants to build a global F&B brand

In December 2018, Abraham Viktor joined Ovo after selling Taralite, the peer-to-peer lending startup he founded, to the Indonesian fintech unicorn. But just six months later, he packed his bags and left.

“At the end of the day, not everyone fits all kinds of work settings. And I’d be one of those people that don’t fit corporates,” he says.

He talked to his wife and also spoke with his mentor, Tokopedia co-founder William Tanuwijaya, who both affirmed his calling: starting another company. The idea came to him during a babymoon trip to Hokkaido, Japan, when he realized that the food and beverage (F&B) industry has given birth to huge businesses like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Haidilao.

“Coming from a startup background, I have a bias of only looking at ideas that are typically VC-funded,” Viktor says.

Photo credit: Hangry

In September 2019, he and two co-founders officially launched Hangry, a chain of virtual restaurants serviced by cloud kitchens. The mission: to build global, top-of-mind F&B brands.

The company started with a lone outlet at a Central Jakarta condominium, selling an average of 1,000 portions of food per month. One year later, as food delivery was thriving during the Covid-19 pandemic, that number jumped to over 525,000 portions per month across 40 locations in the Greater Jakarta area and Bandung.

VCs have taken notice. Hangry has raised a total of US$6.5 million over two rounds of funding.

Building the next big thing

Hangry currently has five brands, each of which serves either trendy food or traditional Indonesian dishes:

• Moon Chicken (Korean chicken wings)
• San Gyu (Japanese beef bowl)
• Bude Sari (Indonesian traditional chicken dishes)
• Ayam Koplo (American fried chicken with Indonesian chili sauce)
• Kopi Dari Pada (coffee and milk-based drinks)

All of the brands are individually available on the GoFood and GrabFood platforms. Customers can also order through the Hangry app, which allows them to purchase items from different brands in one go. That said, the app is mainly meant as a platform for customer engagement, rather than sales. For example, app users can play games to earn points, which can eventually be traded for free food from one of the brands.

While Moon Chicken and San Gyu see the most demand, only 15% of Hangry’s customers overlap across the startup’s different businesses.

This is deliberate, Viktor says. Firstly, it allows for a wider customer base by appealing to varied preferences – customers say they discover Hangry brands simply because they’re looking for options. Data suggests that many customers do end up becoming more loyal to each brand as months go by: New customers order 1.2x a month on average, and this typically grows to 1.8x by the fifth month.

Secondly, it also presents cost-saving opportunities. For example, each of Hangry’s fried chicken brands uses a different part – wings for Moon Chicken, thighs for Bude Sari, and breasts for Ayam Koplo. This allows Hangry to optimize raw material costs by buying the chicken at volume, while also minimizing wastage.

Evolving from a virtual restaurant