How new age start-ups are helping home-chefs grow

In the last one year the demand for home cooked food has seen an upsurge with new and innovative players entering the space making an exceptional growth for the online platform too.

According to reports published on the Indian Brand Equity Foundation’s website, the organised food business in India is worth US$ 48 billion, of which food delivery is valued at US$ 15 billion.

With online food delivery players like Zomato, TinyOwl and Swiggy building scale through partnerships, the organised food business has a huge potential and a promising future.

New in the race

Traditional food or Indian cuisine is always loved by Indian. Therefore, there is a higher growth potential of the home cooked chefs and portals offering home cooked food and menus. And as people is becoming health conscious after adopting the western lifestyle. Hence just cooking is not enough; one has to add nutritional values with some innovative ideas like bringing a desi menu with a health tadka.

Abhay Hanjura, Founder & CEO at Licious who recently build an online meat delivery platform said, “Both Vivek, my Partner and I, are passionate food lovers and we used to bond a lot over good food, especially meat. This is where we saw a huge gap and opportunity in building a world-class consumer brand that focuses on hygiene and quality. This, very unorganised space definitely needed a solution from the traditional meat buying options, which we believe were driven more out of lack of choice than anything else”.

Innovative Ideas

Menu is the main contributor for the victory of any food business. The menu should look attractive, elaborate with diverse variety of cuisines for the customers but with same quality of service and location. Many players add food additives and colour additives to make look attractive and thrilling to their customers.

“We work hard to ensure our menus are balanced every day. Seven key parameters are considered in designing our daily menus, including veg/non veg mix, Indian and international foods spread, pricing range, dish types etc. It is important that our customers who have diverse food preferences have their needs met. One of the advantages MealTango has over the conventional restaurant is the fact that all the foods are made by experts in their own right. So, we aren't limited by one head-chef and his range of expertise. We have a large number of home chefs each exhibiting their strong suite of skills”, pointed Saket Khanna, Co-Founder at MealTango.

According to the chefs, the home makers have been cooking for a very long time, yet they believe that the chef makes better food. But that is not true as experience is also something which matters in cooking. And home cooked chefs only give importance to the taste unlike restaurants who gives importance in various other elements like ambience, visual appeal, texture consistency etc in the designing of the menu. 

Way forward

Start-up like Heat2Eat will expand across the Mumbai and after that Pan India and some big cities like Delhi, Bangalore where there is lots of opportunities peeping for these start-ups. Similarly, Cyber chef has plans to reach out to Pune and Bangalore by the end of 2016. Eatlo is also planning to enter Gurgaon and Mumbai.

Hence, home cooked start-ups making nutritional and sustainable food to meet the customers demand. As “Customer has varied taste and only few prefer to taste the same food every day and most customers are health conscious and value to money also. Food ingredients have become a curious factor to them”, said Rohini Gauthaman, Co Founder, Smoky Chettinad.