 "Life beyond advertising: Adip Nayak")
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Everyone loves good food; well, almost everyone. But Adip Nayak, creative director and 3D, multimedia artist at Creativeland Asia, takes his love for food a little more seriously than most. Almost a year back, Nayak and his business partner started Foodees ,a tiffin delivery service in Mumbai. Having lived in Muscat, Oman, Sweden and now Mumbai, he has been exposed to a variety of cuisines all his life. Read on to know why food is personal to him, why he is willing to drive from one city to another just for lunch at that one favourite restaurant and how Foodees works.
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Nayak is a creative director at Creativeland Asia[/caption]
When and how did your serious love for food shape into Foodees?
My father has been a hotelier in India and the Middle East since before I was born; my brother, too, followed suit. I have always been around hotels - whether in kitchens or visiting different restaurants and trying out all kinds of cuisines. Even dinners back home have something special every day. Hence, I couldn’t really help having an opinion on how food should be made, cooked and eaten since I was young; it was always personal. I even plan my trips around food.
After shifting my base to Mumbai, all I did was to go all over the city in search of something new to try. One day Dinesh, my chef friend, handed me a brochure of his new tiffin delivery venture. I helped him out with the branding and design, and that is how it all began. My contribution to the whole thing was just supposed to stop at helping Dinesh initially. Before I knew it, I was giving him feedback from a customer’s lens, telling him what he should be focusing on and what was missing and the works. Foodees started right about there.
What about food excites you the most?
There isn’t any one thing in isolation I love about food, because I believe that the entire experience is what makes the whole thing special. It doesn’t have to be the best possible food on the plate; the place, the people you are with, even the drive to the restaurant counts. Going all the way to Pune just to eat at this one particular restaurant I love, too, is an experience for me. It’s not just a enter-a-restaurant-order-food-eat-it-and-leave scenario. Every little thing makes a difference.
How does Foodees work?
We are a team of six people making about 300 tiffins a day. We began as a tiffin service before moving on to a la carte as well.
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The Foodees Classic Veg dabba (courtesy: Adip Nayak)[/caption]
We thankfully have a great kitchen space in Lokhandwala, Mumbai. I look after the business development side of things, right from setting up the menu to marketing to even taking calls! Dinesh looks after the food side completely. The past one year has taught us a lot of things; I look at excel sheets, sort out orders and finish the loose ends every night before I sleep. Who would’ve thought?
The process begins with setting the menu for the week, under each category. We come to this conclusion as we answer a simple question for ourselves: What food do we want to eat this week? Once we know that, the menu goes up on the site after which people place their orders and we get rolling.
What is the biggest differentiator you offer vis a vis the other tiffin delivery services?
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The Foodees Lasagne (courtesy: Adip Nayak)[/caption]
Simply put, the variety. No one service discloses the menu a week in advance, thus, a customer is forced to eat whatever is in the lunchbox. Other services also demand unreasonable trial periods like for a whole week. If a person doesn’t like the food on the first day, he is surely not going to love it after that.
We even have one-day trial periods, so as to not force the customer to have our dabba just for our profit. There is no fixed monthly plan; it’s completely the customer’s call.
Every type of meal plan we offer is customizable. Don’t want rotis? That’s fine. Just want dal and steamed rice? Cool. Mixing and matching is completely possible with us. Since the customer incurs the delivery charge anyway, we can send whatever they want to eat. There is less wastage that way, too.
What is the biggest challenge you face?
Other tiffin services have a standard menu of roti, sabzi, dal and rice. This way they can order in bulk and minimize costs. With us, that is isn’t the case; we change our menu every week. Anyone can cook good food, but making a viable business off of it is a different ball game.
Another challenge we face almost daily is dealing with the dabbawalas. Since the person who picked up the food from us isn’t the one getting it across to the customer, it can get very difficult to track when a dabba arrives late / gets misplaced and a customer asks why. It takes me about 15-20 minutes per customer to figure out where the dabbas are. But then again, we can never match the network dabbawalas have and that too for just Rs. 30 per dabba.
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Veg pasta (courtesy: Adip Nayak)[/caption]
Figuring out costs, too, can get really mind-boggling, because of the variety we offer. Stocking up on inventory is another challenge. Lastly, marketing our service has been a task; we obviously don’t have fancy budgets, so we try and market with the available tools we have. The journey is full of challenges, but that is what makes it fun, really.
Does work ever come in the way of your venture or vice versa? How do you strike a balance?
A lot of my time goes into Foodees, while balancing a demanding job like advertising. Most of it entails working late into the night, weekends. But since Dinesh understands and is very dependable, I have been able to do my job well. Raj (Sajan Raj Kurup, founder and creative chairman at Creativeland Asia) and my colleagues have been very great about Foodees; most of them order from us, too!
How has the support from friends and family been?
They have been superb! I have friends who cook very well, so they come over and cook something special for us. We have had a friend cook up some great Bengali food for us in the past, and we have had some great Parsi fare as well. We try and target festive seasons whenever we can, just to keep things interesting. We have sent kheer and aam ras before, and we are also open to suggestions from our clientele.
My family helps with the business side of things and helps me fix the menu. Thank god for them!
Adip’s five favourite haunts in Mumbai, and what he recommends eating there:
Indigo - Their Bacon Quiche is to die for.
All Stir Fry - This is probably the best wok in the city
Caf Royale - Just go for the Beef Sizzler with your eyes shut
Northern Tadka - A local North Indian restaurant in Andheri, with surprisingly amazing food. Order their starters, surely.
- Caf Sundance - I’m a huge fan of burgers, so I’m going to simply recommend their Beef and Bacon Burger.
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