Cook'dIn striving to achieve ISO standards & FSSAI in 12 months
Cook'dIn striving to achieve ISO standards & FSSAI in 12 months

Please share your entrepreneurial journey and what led to the birth of your brand?

The trio Hemal (Desai), Harsh (Vardhan) and me were friends over a decade. Passionate foodies and weekend chefs brings a unique flavour to the palate called Cook’dIn. Motivated thought empowering people made us start Cook’dIn as a catalyst and facilitator. Cook’dIn creates a primary/secondary revenue stream for homemakers and low income groups for home-cooked food. It is a convergence platform, which aspires to be a worldwide phenomenon, truly empowering individuals on what they cook/eat, when they cook/eat, where they cook/eat and also reducing the cost of what they cook/eat. 

What are the challenges in growing your business i.e. maintaining standards, brand integrity, customer experience etc and how have you met these challenges?

We have planned all the challenges for the road ahead. This plan includes brand building, health and hygiene standards, customer experience etc. We are also striving to achieve applicable ISO standards and FSSAI (which is yet not applicable on home cooked meal), within next 12 months.

Do you have a growth targets for the next few years and can you reveal any strategy to achieve this?

To start with we are eyeing a potential serviceable customer base of 1.1 lakhs, out of the targetable 4.4 lakh households. Home chefs, who are registered on Cook'dIn have a huge marketplace to cater as there are not many restrictions on home chefs they continue to remain their own bosses. The yearning in urban households for ‘Ghar ka Khana’ is what spurred the idea of Cook’dIn.

We expect to add Tier II city by the end of third or beginning of fourth quarter in our operations. The target is to be able to cover 7-8 cities by the end of three years. We have prepared this business model with in depth market research for over nine months from the beginning of 2015. 

Do you change your menu daily? What all is required in designing menu?

The menu is driven by home chefs, who desire to cook as per consumer’s want. The trend analysis is based on feedback provided to home chefs to make suitable changes.

Where would you like to see your brand in the next five years?

We are expecting to cover all cities, targeting mainly in India by fifth year of operation. At the same time we would have established beach heads in cities like Europe, S.E. Asia, Middle East and Latin America. We have already done in depth market research for North American market and will take appropriate steps.

As we have seen lots of chef-driven start-ups in 2014-2015. What makes you unique from them?

Our USP is ‘Home Chefs’. We are planning to bring amazing variety of cuisines on board, both Indian and Global. Cook’dIn is a ‘convergence platform’ for home chefs and consumers, from different parts of India and world.

Our ‘free market approach’, sets us apart from others. There are other critical aspects to our business model, which makes us unique i.e. Logarithm based Food Allergy match with meal ingredient, low price and high quality meal delivered at your food step, average meal price for a home delivered meal is Rs.480; we also expect to have our average price in vicinity of Rs. 250 and many more. 

 
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