By the time Suruchi Mangal, 27, who works as a merchandiser with Impulse, an apparel supplier brand in Gurugram, reaches home on weekdays, it’s usually past 8 pm. The last thing she wants to do is step into the kitchen to start prepping for dinner. “I felt guilty about ordering in restaurant food every night,” says Mangal.
There are many such examples where millennials are facing a lot of issues to meet their daily food requirement. With the sudden rise in demand for a good domestic cook coupled with the reduction in the supply of such hands at an affordable price, a typical nuclear family with working husband & wife find it very difficult to take time out from their daily routine to cook a decent and hygienic meal at home in a traditional manner. Fully cooked food ordered from outside is always a concern from the health point of view but they are bound to do so in the absence of an alternative solution. When it comes to cooking, the hassle of procuring ingredients in the right quantity, processing them as per the recipe, making dough and wastage of un-utilized raw and processed food coupled with the absence of time required for all these activities compel them to avoid cooking.
Not only in India, but millennials across the globe are also facing this issue and there, many innovative solutions came up only to fail in the long period. The urge to find a sustainable, innovative but simple solution to this problem was like trying to eat a cactus like a camel. But after a lot of research and market surveys over the years, entrepreneurs came up with a concept of meal-box which contains all the ingredients of a particular dish which the customer wants and can be customizable if it’s an option. Today this concept is booming in the USA where the meal-kits delivery has raised above 1 billion $ in venture capital till date and is expected to reach 35 billion $ in sales by 2026. Around 150 meal kit delivery services are active in the US right now and are sold both in subscription and a-la-carte models.
Although in India, this concept is still in its initial stage trying to woo customers but due to their deep beliefs in traditional cooking methods, it is still struggling to become favourites among masses. Still, there is a hope that in the near future, this will be booming in India too as we have a large share of young population with increasing disposable income. The change in consumer lifestyle and the rising number of working women coupled with less availability of reliable cooks and increasing urbanization can also trigger this concept. Another and most important factor is that millennials are becoming more and more health conscious and want to check the ingredients going into their food, so it’s highly likely that meal kits (DIY-kits) concept can have a booming future in India.
By : Shubham Maheshwari, MD & CEO at Being Chef