Kitchen’s Food-Hyderabad & Bangalore

A Commander in the Indian Navy with 15 years of flying combat planes, followed by MBA from ISB, and followed by working with Google for 4 years. Current mission? Making sure you get home cooked meals without stepping into your kitchen. Sounds like a dream come true?  Rishi Raj founder of Kitchen’s Food spoke to TYT about his venture, his detailed approach with its execution and his passion to give people a taste of home no matter where they are.

Kitchen’s Food is an online portal that connects you with home chefs and their delicacies. Currently operational in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, this site lists home cooked meals based on your location. Once you place the order, your meal is delivered to your doorstep. Launched in Dec 2013, Kitchen’s Food was the first one of its kind. Since this was a relatively new concept at that time, I had to ask the question- Why a portal for home food? “Home cooked meals are always preferred, so why not?” came the response. “With so many people living away from home, there is always a need for home cooked meals and there is definitely a huge market for it.” The idea of Kitchen’s Food came to Rishi when he met Divya Maheshwari, the co-founder of Kitchen’s Food, who is also a home chef. She was planning to give people an opportunity to try her home cooked meals. Rishi soon realized that there would be more home chefs out there who would love to showcase their cooking and a whole lot of people who would benefit from such a concept. This is how Kitchen’s Food came to be.

While the ordering seems pretty simple, the background work that goes into getting a home chef on board is quite rigorous. Make sure you go through their quality control measures as it definitely speaks to their emphasis on giving people not just home cooked meals, but meals of the best quality. First each home chef is registered as per FSSAI standards.  Following this hygiene, sanitation and food safety tests are conducted. Once all this is cleared, the home chefs have to get a vendor license. While Kitchen’s Food helps them to do so, they do not accept home chefs without the license. Hold on! It does not end here. Kitchen’s Food’s quality team now visits and checks the chef’s kitchen for cleanliness, pest control measures etc. They also take a video of the meal preparations and test the chef for quantity to ensure consistency and maintenance of standards. Does taste factor in as one of the criteria’s? – I asked. Now here is where I got an answer that I was not prepared for. “No it does not”, adds Rishi. Surprised? Don’t be. Like everything else about Kitchen’s Food, there is a very logical and relevant explanation to this.

Kitchen’s food has a mandatory review system. Once you have tasted a particular chef’s meal, you have to rate them and give your feedback. Meals below a 3-star rating are automatically removed from the portal. The reason behind this interesting turn of events? Statistics! “There is a community involvement, which rules out individual bias. That is the beauty of statistically significant data.” Rishi strongly believes in giving the home chefs a fair chance. As an example, he says if someone tastes a cuisine that they are not familiar with, they might not be the best judge of whether the taste is authentic or even for that matter good. So while their rating system ensures taste, it also does weeds out unfair rejections. Cool eh???

Today Kitchen’s Food has more than 1000 registered chefs on their portal and has served more than 4,000 customers. Kitchen’s Food is also proud of the fact that their food represents cuisines from all regions of India. “From Kashmir to Kerala. This enables people to try out authentic dishes and understand the flavors of regions they are not familiar with”, Rishi adds proudly. With so much attention to detail, I am not surprised by what he tells me when I ask him about the response his venture has gotten. The response, he shares has been immensely favorable. He has had people tell him that they have stopped cooking or have fired their cooks. There are also people who place orders through them every day.

Just as his approach with Kitchen’s Food, Rishi’s advice to all upcoming food entrepreneurs is to keep safety and quality of the food their primary focus. “If you are really passionate about closing a particular gap in the market, go ahead and try it.  But make sure you give importance to the quality of the product. You cannot, cannot serve food that is not of the right quality”, he adds.

With many similar ventures coming up, Rishi says the trick is in the details. “It is not the idea but how it is executed that matters.” Kitchen’s Food plans to continue adding more deserving chefs to their portal. They are also working on raising their first round of funding.  We wish this venture success in all its future endeavors.

Visit Kitchen’s Food today to start placing your orders. Do stop by their Facebook page to stay updated on their chef specialties, interesting stories and all things food!

Images Courtesy Of Kitchen’s Food