India's food-tech start-ups adding exciting new flavors to home-cooking business
New Delhi: An entire section of working professionals, students, and even senior citizens are dependent on home food service providers for their daily meals, more so in a post-pandemic world.
Open any community Facebook group and you would encounter requests seeking home-made meals on a regular basis. Ordering from restaurants has definitely been on an upward trend, but increasingly people are averse to eating from restaurants, majorly due to health and hygiene reasons, not to mention the hole it burns in your pocket!
This is where Happy Food Technologies, a Bengaluru-based food-tech start-up, saw an opportunity. They created a network of home-chefs and brought them onto a digital marketplace called 'MyKhaana' (www.mykhaana.in) on which users can order home-cooked meals from any home chef and get home-delivery within 60 minutes.
"I moved from Mumbai to Bangalore and I wasn't able to adjust to southern-style food served at my hostel. My pocket money wasn't enough for me to order from Zomato or Swiggy on a daily basis. Discovering MyKhaana was a blessing. I now regularly order rajma chawal, aloo parantha, and other authentic dishes from Punjabi home chefs. My parents are relieved that I am eating home-made food and not binging on junk!" said Aashna Malik, a student studying in Bangalore.
MyKhaana is making its mark as an everyday consumer brand, which everybody identifies with. This keeps their home chefs happy with orders and more importantly, with encouraging reviews that follow.
"MyKhaana takes away the entire hassle of managing a business, and the home chef can concentrate on the cooking! We handle the listing, packaging, delivery, and marketing on behalf of the home chef", said Shriya Khanna, Co-Founder of Happy Food Technologies who quit her job after a decade-long corporate stint with the world's largest FMCG company. "It was my long-time dream to serve my special dishes to a wider audience, of course, I did not have the resources, nor the business acumen to open my own restaurant or cloud kitchen. With MyKhaana I could realize a long-lost dream. I am not on MyKhaana for money. When I receive good feedback from a customer, I feel blessed", said Sushma, who was one of the first KitchenStars to be onboarded with MyKhaana in Bangalore. MyKhaana as a concept holds strong merit. Anywhere between Rs 10-20 lakh of capital is required to set up a cloud kitchen. With MyKhaana, you can start utilizing your home kitchen and the home chef can start earning immediately, with zero investment. Naturally, this cost-benefit gets passed on to the end consumer.
"Cloud kitchens have flourished over the past few years but we realized that home chefs should be given a personality that resonates with the users. Users should get to know more about the person cooking food for them and the regional specialties that they can serve. Our home chefs are not just good chefs, for us they are KitchenStars, we give them a profile page and make them likable. That is what users appreciate. Users are assured of the fact that home chefs will be cooking with the same ingredients they use for their families. This works like a quality assurance mechanism for us," said Satej Salvi, the Co-Founder and business brain at Happy Food Technologies.
After an encouraging response in Bangalore which predominantly has a migrant population staying away from their home location, MyKhaana plans to launch its services across major cities in the country. Further, MyKhaana plans to expand into all things home-made. "We plan to get homemade savories, bakery items, pickles, and papads on MyKhaana. These products have been made at home for generations before they got commercialized, and we lost the authentic taste and charm. We aim to get back such flavors of India. What best to use the collective effort of home chefs who also would get recognition in the process. The quintessential 'dadi ke haath ka khaana' is never available in restaurants. We want to bring back that experience." India's food-tech space was already heated up and companies like Happy Food Technologies are adding more flavors to the home-food market. Users can indeed look forward to new, richer food experiences, this time from talented home-chefs on platforms like MyKhaana (www.mykhaana.in).
