Now order online and get food from home kitchens in Chennai

If our mornings began with a bad coffee, most of us would kick up a fuss and whine about it, but forget by the end of the day. But, a not-so-great coffee served by his mother led entrepreneur Arun Prashanth Bacthavatsalam to realise how it was assumed the duty of countless cooks to please their entire family’s taste buds. The coffee, also directed the businessman, to create a mobile application that aims to give homemakers their due.

“After self-reflection, I understood how I never credited my mother all the years when she served a great coffee, but was complaining when it wasn’t up to the mark. I realised that homemakers deserve acknowledgement and after about three years of work along with a team of web developers, I decided to launch an app that allows home cooks to prepare food at their convenience, to be delivered to those living away from their homes and missing their mothers’ food. This helps homemakers have a sustainable revenue and, on the other hand, gives the diners the comfort of home food,” said Arun, launching the food delivery platform EAT, an acronym for Eat All Time.

“Madurai food is best made when made by a homemaker from Madurai, and similarly Goan food can be served up the most authentic way by a Goan home cook. With a huge migrant and expat community living in our city, we often see many of us craving for home food. The app is aimed at catering to all such cravings,” added the 29-year-old businessman, who is also the CEO of restaurants Tovo and Thambi Vilas in the city.

Placing itself in the highly competitive food delivery space that is currently dominated by online food ordering and delivery platforms like Swiggy, Zomato and Uber Eats, the home-grown app lists homemakers from different communities living in the city. With 12 home chefs registered on the platform currently, the app allows users from the localities of T Nagar, Teynampet and Saidapet opt for a native cuisine of their choice — for instance from Karaikudi, Madurai, Kodagu, Goa, Andhra, among other regions. One of their 65-member delivery fleet then picks up the order to get it to your doorstep. Over the next few days, the platform targets to service Adyar, Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR) and Thiruvanmiyur regions.

Usha Seetharam, a city-based home baker who makes healthy cookies for lactating mothers named ‘Make More Milk’ as part of her brand Ushbakeistan, believes the platform can provide home cooks with a lot of freedom. “The dynamic menu allows a home cook to make the kinds of dishes he or she is comfortable with making for that day, which provides a lot of convenience. It is also nice that people get to order home cooked food. So, even as a consumer, I think the app would be very helpful,” said Usha, who is yet to go live on the platform, once it serves more localities in the city.

During the app’s launch recently, a few home cooks, however, admitted to being unsure of how to estimate the demand in order to prep the food. “It will be difficult for us to cater to a small number of orders. Unlike restaurants, it is not possible to prepare food on the spot and serve, as we will need time to prepare for the dishes,” remarked Mignonne Thomas, a home cook specialising in Goan and Anglo-Indian cuisines.

Meanwhile, Arun has laid out his expansion plan for the app, which has been built with an investment of Rs 5-crore so far. “We want to focus on making our presence significant in Chennai over the next six months, and then expand to Tier-I and II cities over the next two years. We are looking at going international in another three years. Craving for home food is a problem that people face world over, and we want to be there to solve it,” he added.