Rebel Foods is the world's largest chain of internet restaurants, operating brands such as Faasos, Oven Story, and Behrouz Biryani across India, the Middle East, and the UK. High-quality food photography is central to its online food delivery app, EatSure, where customers browse multiple brands and menus in a single experience.
As app usage and the number of owned and partnered brands increased, Rebel Foods' in-house image pipeline began to show its limitations. Image-heavy screens were slow to load, optimizations were basic, and the engineering team was spending too much time maintaining resizing logic and media delivery infrastructure.
By moving image delivery to ImageKit, Rebel Foods has built a fast, scalable, and low-maintenance image optimization layer on top of its existing storage. Its app, EatSure, now loads significantly faster on mobile, and the team has clear visibility and control over how images are delivered across regions and devices.
"With ImageKit, our image-heavy app screens now load under 2 seconds instead of several seconds earlier. Customers see menus almost instantly, and our engineers no longer have to maintain custom image processing services. We just plug into ImageKit and focus on product work instead."
Vishal Chaudhari, Engineering Manager, Rebel Foods
Key results:
- 75% faster home screen loading: Reduced from 7–8 seconds to under 2 seconds
- Automated AVIF & WebP conversion: Smaller image payloads at high visual quality
- Increase in traffic handled seamlessly: With new brands, apps, and geographies getting added, ImageKit handled sustained traffic, without any engineering overhead for Rebel Foods.
The challenge: Image performance could not keep up with business growth
As Rebel Foods grew from a single-brand operation to a global multi-brand network, the in-house image delivery pipeline that worked in the early days could no longer keep up with scale or product complexity.
1. Limited capabilities in the existing image pipeline
Product images were pushed to an S3 bucket via the in-house CMS, resized via a custom Lambda function, and delivered via CloudFront. While this setup worked initially, it had its limitations.
- The system lacked support for device-aware delivery or next-generation formats, leaving users with unnecessarily large JPEGs even when WebP or AVIF was supported.
- The pipeline was set to generate a fixed set of variants, and it couldn't automatically adapt to new layouts, image sizes, or brand launches, requiring manual effort each time.
- Heavy PNG and JPEG assets significantly slowed down home, category, and menu page loading in the EatSure app.
2. Engineering effort diverted from product work
As traffic and the number of brands increased, engineers found themselves spending more time on improving the image processing pipeline than working on the main product.
- The in-house pipeline needed frequent tuning to handle traffic spikes during peak times and promotional campaigns.
- Continuous updates were needed whenever a new design requirement emerged, consuming time that could have gone into core product development.
3. Rising costs with limited visibility
Because images were often unoptimized, cloud costs grew quickly but remained opaque.
- Bandwidth and data egress charges were high, with little clarity on which markets, apps, or assets were driving them.
- There was no consolidated view of how traffic patterns varied across platforms or endpoints, making it challenging to identify optimization opportunities.
Solution: ImageKit as the image optimization and delivery layer
When evaluating options, the team sought a solution that would integrate with existing storage, support URL-based transformations, and provide a global CDN with robust analytics. ImageKit matched these requirements and could be integrated with minimal changes to workflows and app code.
1. Direct integration with existing S3 storage
Rebel Foods didn't need to migrate or re-upload any assets. ImageKit was plugged into their existing setup:
- ImageKit was configured to use the current S3 buckets as origin sources.
- Image URLs across all applications were updated to point to new ImageKit-mapped domains, preserving the original folder structure and paths.
- The content team continued using the same workflow of uploading assets to S3 through the CMS. Any new image became instantly accessible via ImageKit and was automatically optimized according to the user's device and network conditions.
This allowed Rebel Foods to adopt ImageKit without disruption, preserving existing processes while gaining immediate performance benefits.
2. On-the-fly resizing and optimization
ImageKit now handles all resizing and format decisions in real-time when an asset is requested. Front-end teams specify required dimensions using URL parameters for each placement, such as thumbnails, banners, and large menu images. High-resolution master assets are automatically converted to efficient formats such as WebP or AVIF when the device and browser support them.
To list on third-party delivery platforms, each with different image requirements, the team shared ImageKit URLs optimized for each platform.
3. Global CDN and automatic scaling
ImageKit's built-in CDN now delivers media across all the markets where Rebel Foods operates. Customers receive images from the nearest edge location, reducing latency for users in India, the Middle East, and the UK. ImageKit's infrastructure handles traffic spikes driven by marketing campaigns, eliminating the need for Rebel Foods to manage the operational aspects of media delivery.
This has resulted in consistently low time-to-first-byte for images, with no engineering effort from Rebel Foods during peak periods.
Results: Faster and performant visual experiences
The shift to ImageKit delivered measurable improvements in both user experience and operational efficiency.
- 75% faster app screens and smoother browsing: Pages that were previously slowed down by heavy image assets now load significantly faster. Homepage and core menu screens improved from roughly 7–8 seconds to about 2 seconds. Users can scroll across brands and dishes with near-instant image loading, creating a more fluid and engaging browsing, and ultimately checkout, experience.
- **Confident scaling traffic across geographies: ** As Rebel Foods expanded into new markets and user adoption grew, image delivery traffic surged by more than 50%. With ImageKit in place, performance remained stable even during peak mealtimes, high-volume campaigns, and major brand launches.
- Lower and more predictable delivery costs: By combining on-the-fly optimization with a more cost-efficient global CDN, Rebel Foods significantly reduced its overall media delivery spend, while gaining much clearer predictability as traffic scaled.
- Higher quality at lower file sizes: Even with aggressive optimization happening behind the scenes, food images retained the sharpness and appeal needed to drive user engagement and conversions.
- Reduced engineering overhead: Offloading image processing and delivery to ImageKit freed up the engineering team from constant maintenance and tuning. Developers could redirect their efforts toward core initiatives such as personalization systems, new app features, and rapid brand rollouts.
Building on the success of image optimization, Rebel Foods is now exploring additional opportunities to leverage ImageKit for video delivery, AI-powered transformations, and automated creative workflows.
Conclusion
By integrating ImageKit on top of its existing S3-based storage, Rebel Foods transformed image delivery from a persistent performance bottleneck into a reliable, high-performing asset across all its applications, including EatSure. Pages load noticeably faster, bandwidth consumption is more efficient, and the engineering team has reclaimed valuable time to focus on higher-impact product initiatives.
As Rebel Foods expands into new regions and introduces richer, more dynamic visual content, ImageKit now serves as a scalable, future-ready media delivery layer, supporting both the company’s current demands and its long-term growth ambitions.
