Foodella - Order tiffin onlin thru mobile app and website
Yash Thakker and Ashish Pirojiya are the co-founders of Foodella - a student startup which aims at collaborating Technology and Creativity to provide the easiest solution to order Tiffins online.
The present Daily Meals (Tiffin) market across whole country is huge and is totally not segmented. There is no use of technology or on demand service to provide healthier pocket friendly meals. FOODELLA solves all these problems. FOODELLA is a single step solution to this problem. We have developed a website and application through which you can order customized daily meals from huge varieties of food that we provide daily keeping in mind the price point .The meals are delivered freely and it’s an on demand service. The ordering step is made so simple that you can choose and order your meal in less than 30 seconds. The food quality and taste is maintained by hiring quality experienced chefs. With the help of technology, we do data analysis to give people what they want by the help of text message and real time notification. We plan to add various features through which you can track your meal and also make it more social by implementing various things in which you can meet new people who have taste similar to theirs and living nearby them.This will make the process of ordering food more interactive and fun.
How did you come up with the idea of FOODELLA?
Basically somewhere it was our own problem that led to this idea. We were not a localite and due to which there were problems regarding food that we used to face on daily basis. The passion for entrepreneurship was at its peak in us when we This got us thinking that every year so many students enroll in Ahmedabad for college’s be it graduation or post-graduation and even they might be facing the same problem.Then after doing some survey we found that even the corporate sector,that is quite huge in ahmedabad thanks to the infrastructural development is facing the same problem and is quite huge. That is when we came up with this idea of starting this on-demand daily meal-service.
What problem are you solving?
On a major note, we are solving eating problems of the masses in Ahmedabad who are away from the home. In this age of technology we provide people the choice of what they want to eat in their daily meals by giving them huge variety of healthy choice and providing them the best quality on-demand food service on their doorstep.We provide them with extended 3 months validity customized subscription plans at pocket friendly prices.
How does FOODELLA work?
Its simple.You just have to download the app through app store and playstore sign up,choose your plan , customize and order your meal in less than 30 seconds.The food will be delivered to you during your lunch or dinner time.We provide total quality food with our quality policy open to end users and our chefs have experienced of over 5 years.The food is packed in food grade quality vaccum sealed containers to keep it fresh.
What is your target market?
Our major target segment will be all the non localite students and corporate office workers who rely on outside food for their lunch and dinner and the locality busy working class people .Other than these anyone who is a food lover is our customer. The main advantage of the market is that the customers are repetitive.Our target market also includes the daily commuters through trains or people visiting the city frequently.
What is your competitive advantage?
The competitive advantage that we have is the perfect combination of technology, customization, quality and service,. No one in the market is currently offering this advantage. We are giving the customers an option, a choice to select what they would like to eat at their fingertips and give them an on-demand service. They are paying for what they wish to eat. And in today’s world giving choice to the customers has become so much important because they won’t to settle for less.
How much time did it take you from conceptualization of FOODELLA to actually launching it in the market?
It actually took us 4 months to put this idea of FOODELLA in application. It took us time to come up with ideas that we could venture into. When we were able to figure that out we them started thinking about how we can make things better than the one already existing. And then the whole process of setting up the kitchen, app development, legal documentation took us about 2 months to finish up the whole process. Finally in June, 2015 we launched to the start up in the market.
Tell us more about your team?
Our team consists of 3 people.2 cofounders and 1 other team member. The team complements each other as Ashish (3rd year computers Nirma, cofounder) has his expertise over operations, customer relationships while I head the technology, marketing and partnerships. Preet (3rd year computers Nirma) helps us to make our tech more reliable by applying his vast technical skills.
What is your technology stack?
We have made our own application using our own skills and set of knowledge we acquired from the curriculum. The technology is totally inhouse and not outsourced which has helped us to mould the product as per the user requirement.We keep on giving updates from the frequent reviews that we take from our users and thus make a scalable product.
How do you plan to market your product? What are your customer acquisition strategies?
We have planned a number of ways in which we want to market our product. Initially we were totally dependent on mouth to mouth publicities to save the funds and thus we tried to cover all the colleges and corporate offices by letting them know about our services. We used various social platforms and leaflets to market our products. Now we are coming up with the architecture of promo codes and referral codes in our application and thus increasing our user base. We are also working on making various advertisement to market our service on social media platforms.
What is the revenue model of FOODELLA?
Our revenue model is the margin that we get on the sales we do.We are also approached by various online and offline marketing agencies but we plan to avoid that.
What do you want to achieve from this? What is your larger goal or vision?
As young entrepreneurs this is something we came up with when we are studying and facing the problem of finding ‘ghar jaisa khana’ so we are just trying to help students fulfill that void by the means of providing very healthy, hygienic and delicious food at their will and convenience. We are still in college and if the situations are suitable we would like to expand the same in Ahmedabad district as of now. The long term plans include spreading this in all of Gujarat in the next couple of years as this is a very scalable and much needed service people are looking for in their cities.
What sort of support and feedback are you looking from the community?
We are also the part of same community and are student entrepreneurs , we will be happy towards all kinds of supports and feedback that can make us make this thing big and provide this service to each and everyone in need.
image source: Ahmedabad Mirror
