Dabbawala's Kitchen: Mumbai Iconic Tiffin Service will now prepare your food and deliver it too!

Mumbai Dabbawalas are known for their highly efficient and timely tiffin services. Now they will not only deliver food but will also prepare home-cooked meals through their new venture 'Dabbawala's Kitchen.'

Ritesh Andre, the 4th generation of Dabbawala, whose great grandfather Mahadeo Havaji Bachche was the pioneer of this service wants to take it a step ahead with Dabbawala 4.0. Ritesh has envisioned, designed, and implemented the plan of 'Dabbawala's Kitchen' under Dabbawala 4.0 (the 4th generation of Dabbawalas). Through this venture, women from different parts of the city will prepare home-cooked meals and the Dabbawala will deliver them to the doorsteps of the customer.

Whether you stay alone or have no time to prepare your meal, all you need is good home-cooked food to remind you of your loved ones in the hustle and bustle of this city. But it is very difficult to get the exact taste in any restaurant or community kitchen as the food there is prepared in quantity. “To encounter this problem, we thought of providing food cooked by the housewives of the city and delivering it to the people who seek pure home-like taste,” says Ritesh during an interaction with Local Samosa.

The initial idea of Dabbawala’s Kitchen was to start a centralized kitchen but later switched to the home-cooking model because Ritesh wanted to generate employment and not merely make a profit. “To test this, we first hired 40 women from the ‘Bachat Gaat’ (self-help groups) and asked them to prepare meals,” says the founder. The food prepared by the women was up to the mark and ready to reach the households of Mumbai. The support team provided the ladies with all the necessary materials needed and thus started the Dabbawala’s Kitchen.

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The work of these women starts one day before the order as they have to buy the necessary groceries and ingredients needed. The following day, they get up early in the morning and start cooking the food as per the day’s menu. Once cooked, the tiffins are packed with appropriate addresses on them till 9 am. Dabbawalas then pick all the tiffins from them, convert the addresses into codes (as the entire system of Mumbai Dabbawala’s work on codes), send them to the particular stations via Mumbai locals, and from there deliver it the customer's place. All of this is done before 1 pm and you are ready to savour your home-cooked meal.

“Presently, there are more than 50 home cooks in the team where every woman prepares only up to 20 tiffins per day to maintain the taste and hygiene,” states Ritesh. There are 2 options available currently; a mini meal which consists of 3 rotis, 1 dry veg, 1 gravy veg, a sweet, and a regular meal which has 3 rotis, 1 dry veg, dal, rice, 1 gravy veg/sweet in a vegetarian option. An alternate option is also available where one can choose non-veg food on Wednesdays and Fridays. Thalis start at 105 per meal and no food item is repeated within one month’s cycle.

“People are saying that they got to taste home-like food after such a long time and that is our main goal. Through this venture I want to shape the 130-year-old Mumbai Dabbawala system into Digital Dabbawala and provide as many employment opportunities as possible,” says the visionary of Dabbawala's Kitchen.

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