You can now order your favourite snacks and mithai from their place of origin with just a few clicks. SHAlINI SAKSENA tells you more
Have you ever requested someone to get you a specific snack or a mithai from a famous shop far away from your cityIJ Are you missing your favourite snack from a city you grew up in because your job took you to anotherIJ You can now order your preferred snack, pickle, sweetmeat and even mangoes (when in season) all the way from Ratnagiri!
Portals like Salebhai, Place of Origin, Tastebells and Flavors of My City are offering their services to bring to your doorstep almost whatever your heart desires — rossogolla from KC Das in Kolkata, Shrewsberry biscuits from Kayani Bakery in Pune, dryfruits from Ramlal Vithaldas & Co in Mumbai, kesar angoori petha from Panchhi Pethawala in Agra, Sattu from Bihar and much more.
“The idea to provide food items from across India came when we were looking at what several e-commerce platforms were providing — like apparel. We wanted to bring a service that was not available but people wanted. It began with food and moved on to providing items people were looking for once they moved to other cities and wanted their favourite food item,” Vishwa Vijay Singh, co-founder of salebhai.com, based out of Ahmedabad, says.
To begin with, it was difficult to connect with vendors and convince them to be part of the online platform since they were already big in their respective city. To convince them, Singh and his team spoke the language of conventionality. “We told them that if they wanted to sell their products outside their city, they would have to look for a distributor, set up a warehouse, etc. All this involves cost. But here, we are offering to take your famous product to the rest of the country at no extra cost,” Singh explains.
What the customer sitting, say in Delhi, has to do to order petha from Agra is to go to one of the portals, fill in the details and place an order. Most of them are not accepting cash on delivery so one has to pay via credit/debit card. Once the order is placed, the product is delivered within four days.
A few things to keep in mind though. Since a cold chain is not possible in India, no food item that has cream is being delivered. This also means that for now, you can’t order Hyderabadi biryani as opposed to the US where one can even order an ice cream from another city. However, items that have a shelf life of around 10 days will be delivered in a day, provided that the order has been placed before 2 pm and there is a direct flight from point of origin to point of delivery. Otherwise, it takes two days.
The idea has caught on since most of these portals have a traffic of around 8,000 a month which goes up during the mango season, which are also a one-day delivery item. The orders, for now, come from Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi, Mumbai Bengaluru and Ahmedabad. Bengaluru tops the charts when it comes to number of orders.
“The reason could be that the city is more cosmopolitan than others. Also, people in Bengaluru are more tech-savvy,” says Singh who has been in business for two years.
So is the case with Place of Origin which began its operations in June 2015. For them, it was love for food that propelled them to start their venture and bring food from all over the country to all over the country.
“My partner Sudarsan Metla and me found that people would ask friends and relatives to get them special foods from different places — like coffee from Coorg or bhakarwadi from Pune — and even paid money in advance to them in for it. It made sense to convert this into business,” Ashish Nichani, CEO and co-founder of placeoforigin.in based out of Bengaluru, tells you.
Eightyfive per cent of the times their delivery is within a day unless it is a pickle or anything liquid. “Since it is mandated by law that oil etc can’t be sent by air we are constrained to be sent such consignments by road,” he adds.
At present, placeoforigin 325 products from 70 places in India and to sustain it is operationally heavy. So, after the initial groundwork and once the vendor is part of the set-up all he has to do is put the food item in the packaging provided in advance. The package is then picked up by a courier partner and delivered to the customer directly.
The challenge was to convince traditional, family-run businesses to come onboard. “There were two vendors in Mumbai, Ramlal Vithaldas and Theobroma, who took a lot of convincing. It took Nichani a year-and-a-half to bring Vithaldas on board. But today, he is the No 1 seller on their site.
In order to identify which shop to target, there was a list to begin with since some places were obvious and already famous in a particular city. “But for others, we were got recommendations by shopkeepers who would tells us what to buy from other shops in their city. Customers, too, would send in their recommendations at the early stage and also articles on food,” Nichani tells you. Even though there are competitors, each has a different way of conducting business.
“We are at an early stage of our business and there will be an overlap. The market in India is huge, there is no need to worry and there is scope for all of us to grow,” Nichani says. His site has been briskly adding one or two vendors a day.
“I am not looking at 5,000 vendors. We want quality. I just want five to 10 shops from each city to come on board,” Nichani says.
The good part is that if a bad product is delivered, all the customer has to do is click a picture of it and mail it and the portal refunds the money.
Co-founder Smitha Nair of flavorsofmycity.com based in Pune, tells you that while they do have a refund policy, most customers want the item to be replaced rather than get money back. “The whole idea of placing an order for a particular food item, from say Pune, is because they love the dish. It is not the money that counts. In one per cent cases, where the product gets damaged while in transit, we resend it,” Nair tells you.
For them, the most traffic comes from Mumbai, then Delhi and Bengaluru. Interestingly, she has local people ordering as they want to avoid the hassle of driving to the shop. In most cases, the item is delivered within three to four days, especially in metros.
The best items to buy when people come to her site are Karachi Biscuits from Hyderabad, Dharwad pedha from Babusingh Thakur Pedha, poha chiwda from laxminarayan in Pune and banana chips from Calicut.
