Came across this article about Home Chef and thought of sharing the same with all you housewives!
India’s burgeoning e-commerce sector has helped many become entrepreneurs. Housewives, too, are not far behind. Roped in by online taxi apps to monitor the movement of cabs on their smartphones, now they are becoming a part of the online food and beverages (F&B) industry. Called home chefs, they are literally cooking their way to riches, making between 50-60% of every transaction on websites that offer home-cooked food.
Hyderabad’s Kitchen’s Food is one such start-up that works with housewives to provide healthy home-cooked food to customers. Founded by Rishi Raj, a former Google employee who realised the need for healthy, home-cooked food for professionals staying away from home, it was launched in Hyderabad last year and a month ago in Bengaluru. “I was very excited about this idea, as it not only satisfies our need for home-cooked food, but also empowers housewives by generating an opportunity for them to earn money,” says Raj.
The start-up claims to have sold close to 30,000 meals in the last one year. They have about 800 home chefs on board from Hyderabad and Bengaluru and follow a stringent process while hiring. “It takes six weeks for a chef to enrol with us. The chef has to be internet-savvy enough to get onto our portal and create a nice profile,” says Raj. The home chef is then expected to get a licence from the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India. “The home chef gets a vendor licence, and we do our bit to make sure the food is safe, wherein we take a video of the house where the home chef is cooking, we carry out portion checks and a lot of internal quality checks as well. After that the home chef becomes eligible to post meals on the portal,” says Raj.
CyberChef, a Gurgaon-based start-up, is another firm in this space. Its founder Neha Puri first realised the need for home-cooked food when she came across working professionals and students who often complained about the lack of eating options. This drove her and her team to get housewives on board as home chefs to provide people with the same taste and experience they enjoyed back home.
They started their operations in January and have around 65 home chefs on board from Gurgaon and 25 from Mumbai. “When we started we delivered 500 meals in the first month. Now we deliver 1,000-1,500 meals a month. People have appreciated the idea and have also understood home-cooked food doesn’t have to be a dabba, and it also doesn’t mean that you can take the quality and quantity of the food for granted,” she says. The home chefs work on a profit-sharing basis, with 60% of the transaction value going to the chefs and the rest to the firm.
Anjali, a 35-year-old home chef who works with CyberChef, says the platform has helped her realise and showcase her love for cooking. “I have grown along with CyberChef and the journey has been wonderful. I have always loved cooking and this platform has made me realise my potential and my children are really proud to tell their friends that their mom is a home chef,” she says.
Faasos, a Pune-based technology-focused QSR chain backed by Sequoia Capital, also has home chefs on board. Faasos co-founder Revanth Bhatte says they prefer home chefs who have had experience in dealing with bulk orders and who are professionally trained. “Some home chefs we work with are housewives who have experience in delivering food to parties and events; a few of them also run private baking and cooking classes,” says Bhatte. Fassos specifically approach home chefs to capture the local market by providing them with delicacies that are popular in a particular area. They then run a quality check of the premises where they cook and test the food with some of their loyal customers. “We continuously monitor the quality of their food and if something goes wrong, we discontinue the chefs,” adds Bhatte.
As per Grant Thornton, the combined F&B service market in India is worth R2,04,438 crore, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 23-24% and is expected to touch R3.8 lakh crore by 2017. QSR and casual dining are the two most popular formats that form 45% and 32% of the overall market, respectively.
Source: http://www.financialexpress.com/industry/e-commerce-home-chefs-cook-their-way-to-riches-via-food-start-ups/131115/
