Served on a platter

Culinary treat

The City has a blooming culinary scene, with restaurants dedicated to mastering specific cuisines, but some of the best recipes are locked away as family heirlooms, only to be passed down through the generations.

And there are no parallels to these home-cooked dishes. When Rohan Patnaik, Raghunandan B and Amol Patil realised how valuable these treasures could be, they couldn’t help but start ‘RedCooker’, an app that aggregates dishes from domestic kitchens and lets its users get a taste of the best recipes in Bengaluru.

It has been just a few months since the launch but they have already tapped the potential of numerous home cooks in Whitefield. With plans to expand to the rest of the City, Rohan says, “Initially, the idea we had was different. We aggregated domestic kitchen infrastructure and gave consumers a range of authentic home-cooked meals made by home makers. At the point (the start of the year), we didn’t have an app and took calls over the phone. The idea was to act as a bridge between a home maker and the customer. But this was a huge operational challenge, and the supply chain was unpredictable.” To make the supply chain more predictable, the trio, who have known each other for years, decided to establish a central unit. “The home cooks bring in the food by 11.30 am and then we carry out the orders,” he adds.

Now, along with supplying home cooked food, ‘RedCooker’ also caters to gourmet tastes. “We tested the market for the consumption of gourmet food and the use case was far higher than we expected. These days, the youth want to experiment far more. Probably, out of the 10 meals that one has per week, three to four are new cuisines or foods, while the rest is home cooked food. That’s why we decided to add a gourmet section to the app as well,” says Rohan. Now, they have two in-house chefs who take care of the gourmet dishes, and a group of home cooks.

But what surprised them was how quickly people took to the gourmet dishes, “About 70 per cent of the orders are for gourmet items,” says Rohan.

     On further analysis, they realised one of the reasons for this range gap. “For the gourmet dishes, we had photographs clicked at a studio, while the pictures of the home cooked food are shot in our kitchen. We realised that there is a strong correlation between orders and the photographs.

While Rohan and Amol have been friends for the past 15 years, and studied together at IIT-Bombay, they ran into Raghunandan about five years ago in the City. While Amol takes care of the technical aspect of the start-up, Rohan looks after the operational side and Raghunandan is in charge of the expansion strategy.  Though they are a hyperlocal food delivery service at the moment, residents of Bellandur, Koramangala, Bannerghatta and Indiranagar will soon get a taste of ‘RedCooker’.

Initially, they had trouble coming up with the name for the start-up. “We started off with the name ‘Oye Meal’ as we were dealing only with home cooked food. Then ‘Oye’ became crowded as a space; and since we had gourmet meals as well, the name didn’t make sense,” says Rohan. Some of the other names they came up with are ‘Olive Express’, ‘Zip Meal’, ‘Zip Food’ and ‘Orient Express’.

Unlike most food apps, ‘RedCooker’ is content driven — to make the experience more pleasurable for customers, they have a section that gives detailed information about each dish. Also, to help health-conscious consumers, the app tells you whether a dish is high or low in calories, fat, carbohydrates and proteins. So, whether you are craving for some ‘Coq au vin’ or ‘Pudina rice’, it’s all just a click away.