Mona Soundankar and Jit Salunke, Mealnut: Customized meals, delivered to your doorstep

We at YourStory recently caught up with entrepreneur Jit Salunke, the co-founder of Mealnut, a meal delivery service in Pune. In this chat with YourStory, Jit speaks about the business idea behind Mealnut, delivering meals all over Pune and their prepaid mobile recharge-like payment system.If someone asked you to tell them about Mealnut in about three sentences, what would you say?

Mealnut delivers to your door customized, quality and hygienic meals in Pune. It lets the user decide their meal from the daily-changing menu which has 20 Maharashtrian and North Indian food options. Users can choose to do it online, on phone or by SMS.

How is Mealnut different from other tiffin services?

Conventional tiffin services run on monthly subscription and fixed meals model. They provide specific type of meal like vegetables (subzi), chapati, rice and dal or two subzis, chapati, rice and dal with add-ons for the whole month and all meals are charged a fixed amount. So, it is a very rigid model where customers’ food preferences are not considered.

At Mealnut, we let the user select their meal from a number of food options. Every day, we keep more than 20 food options. For example, you can access our meal options for the dayhere. Users have the freedom to select whatever he/she wants from it. The price of the meal depends on the food items selected by the user. For instance, one day the user can havesubzi, dal, chapati and on the second day, he/she can have vegetable biryani, raita and some dessert.

As the price depends on the food item selected by the user, he/she can also decide the limit of the meal price too. Unlike tiffin services, we don’t compel users to order every day. Mealnut has a payment system just like the mobile phone prepaid recharge. So, user can order meals as per convenience till the balance in their account goes to zero.

How did the business idea for Mealnut come about?

Mealnut was born after our suffering poor quality tiffin services in Pune and Bangalore for almost 6 years. Both of us, Mona (my co-founder) and I, are from Nashik. We studied in Pune. So, we had to live in hostels for college and after that, for our jobs. There was no option but to join the local mess/tiffin service or head to restaurants. While dealing with the food served by such services, we came up with ideas which had the potential to solve the problems faced by every user of tiffin/mess services.At that time, we were working on our previous startup Beaty (in the SMS space) which was getting good response in terms of subscribers. But the revenue through ads was a paltry sum. So, we abandoned the first startup and started Mealnut.

Tell about your educational background & prior work experience.

Both Mona and I have done our B. Tech (Electronics and Telecommunication) from College of Engineering Pune. I’ve worked at Infosys, Bangalore and Mona has worked at Idea Cellular, Pune.

Where do you see customizable tiffin services and Mealnut five years from now?

We believe that Mealnut is pretty much going to change the way people have their daily meals.  You know how a certain customer segments prefer hypermarkets instead of the localkirana store? We’re betting on the same happening in this space also. The tiffin service market has been disorganised and stagnant in terms of innovation, quality and service. We aim to change that.

What is Mealnut's revenue model?

Mealnut charges customers for the meals served. We have a prepaid system where customer recharges his account for Rs.500/- or more and the price of meal gets deducted from his balance.

What are the challenges that you face as a meal delivery service?

The challenges are plenty - finding and training human resources, removing ingrained bad habits in the food sector, maintaining consistent quality, on-time deliveries, right pricing, predicting orders, etc. And of course, the biggest challenge is in making Mealnut scalable.

How big is the Mealnut team? Are you looking at hiring?

Currently, the team has 7 people with Sameer and Nandini of TheMorpheus on the advisory board of Mealnut. Out of 7 people, 3 look after cooking food and the others take care of sales, delivery and administration. Yes, we are definitely looking for people to join the Mealnut team. We’re looking for people who are passionate about food, cooking and customer service.

How has the Mealnut journey been so far? Let us know about your expansion plans.

Currently, we are operational in a small area of Pune (Kothrud) and have 35 active regular customers with additional instant orders and growing. Mealnut has started promotions in the coverage area and is looking to reach breakeven point this month. We are looking to extend over coverage area to other parts of Pune once we reach break even. Taking Mealnut to other cities will certainly take time.

We at YourStory wish Jit and the entire team at Mealnut much success. So, if you’re in Pune and you’re looking out for a good meal service which offers options, do givewww.mealnut.com a whirl. Also, do let us know what you think of this story by writing to us at [email protected].

Sriram Mohan | YourStory | 27^th July 2011 | Bangalore