Curated recipes in themed boxes - Eatopia
If you are a foodie, Eatopia is your one stop shop to experience foods from all across India. It’s a food website which curates all new recipes of yummy food to interesting stories coming from the kitchens of your neighborhood home.
Eatopia is a Mumbai based startup, started in Aug 2012, by Tanul Mishra and Shipra Bhansali who share their love and passion for food. It is a curated marketplace for food that is not easily available in most cities. They are also introducing artisanal and traditional products from across the country and creating themed boxes to enable customers to experience flavors, techniques and recipes from around India. Shipra shares with us about her Eatopia.
How did you come across this opportunity to start Eatopia?
As affluence increases in India, people spend more time on food and seek varied food experiences. Most other food-based sites are either pure recipe sites or restaurant review sites. We saw a gap. Nobody was selling a variety of traditional Indian foods geared to a younger audience, no platform for people to learn as well as experience new and interesting ingredients and techniques. We built Eatopia to merge stunning content that introduces people to interesting food from around the country and around the world and also allows them to experience these food discoveries through our Eatopian Delights subscription boxes.
What inspired you to start Eatopia as you both come from completely different background?
Our shared passion for food and our multicultural families and environments have meant that we've had the privilege of experiencing a breadth of variety in food that not everyone gets to experience. The inspiration for starting up was to bring food stories from peoples’ home to readers and we knew a revenue model would emerge.
And in August 2013 we started bringing good indigenous and artisanal products from across the country to our readers. This is very relevant in the Indian scenario. India has a diverse food culture and food styles and so much of it is not available in supermarkets or retail chains. A lot of these indigenous products will disappear without a sustained effort to keep them alive. And at Eatopia we want to bridge this gap. The long term path of Eatopia is to be a marketplace that helps people look at food differently and provides a platform for the countries artisan food makers to reach our tables.
What is your revenue model?
Our current revenue model is our subscription box, discovery commerce service. This consists of curated and themed subscription boxes of handpicked artisanal food from around India. The aim is to bring the different food cultures found across India direct to consumers’ tables, allowing them to experience the diversity of tastes and flavors found in our country.
What were your initial challenges and how did you overcome them?
Finding reliable vendors as we are bootstrapped was one of our biggest challenges. We've managed to search for and find some excellent partners in our journey, from logo design all the way to our box manufacturer. We've made friends along the way, got unbelievable prices, and learnt a whole lot, whether it's coding or photo editing.
What are your key learnings from your entrepreneurial journey so far?
Pick a partner you're compatible with. It's like being married.
Be comfortable with hearing negative feedback and filter as needed. It helps you grow.
And have fun while you are it :-)
Recently, they have partnered with Akanksha whereby for every box of Eatopian Delights sold, Rs.100 will be contributed to the Akanksha art project.
You can reach out to Shipra & Tanul on their FB page here.