Flymyfood flies your favourite dish from different cities to your doorstep
You no longer have to go to Hyderabad to taste the popular biryani of Paradise Biryani, or go to Kolkata to sample the mouthwatering ‘gud’ (jaggery) sandesh.
You can have these delicacies delivered to your doorstep. Thanks to Flymyfood, a Kolkata-based startup, which ensures the best and authentic Indian dishes don’t get limited to a particular city or place.
Brainchild of four engineers -- Ankit Singh, Abhishek Borar, Abhishek Dubey and Achyut Bihani --
Flymyfood.in picks up food items from the source and delivers to the end consumer the very next day. “We are a bunch of passionate foodies looking to solve a critical problem,” says Ankit.
Sitting in their college, 1000 kms from home, the four friends often wondered how they could taste the sabzi or halwa which their moms made especially for them. Finding no ready answers they decided to solve their own problem.
With their innovative packaging, lightning-fast logistics and a deep understanding of the customer, they started Flymyfood last year.
Ankit and Achyut completed their engineering from IIT Kharagpur, while Borar is in the last year of engineering from the same campus. Dubey is an alumnus of NIT Jamshedpur. “Initially, we were working on another model where we aimed to aggregate popular cuisines for food aficionados in Kolkata,” says Ankit. Later, their mentor B.Hari, an Indian Angel Network (IAN) member, asked them to tweak the model and Flymyfood came into existence.
The venture is being incubated at STEP, IIT Kharagpur’s in-house incubator. “We recently pitched at hot pitch in TiECon Kolkata, and are in talks with different investors,” reveals Ankit. At present, Flymyfood is operational in Kolkata and Delhi (NCR) and does around 1,000 orders a month with average transaction size of Rs. 800. The startup has a monthly turnover of Rs. 6,00,000 and is cash positive. Flymyfood charges a margin from vendors on every sale.
Usually most e-commerce startups are headquartered in Delhi (NCR), Bangalore or Mumbai. Flymyfood
operates from Kolkata because as Ankit says, “Kolkata is a good place for food retail and the city loves to eat and talk. And such attributes help us grow faster.”Managing logistics is a big challenge in food centric marketplace model and Flymyfood also admits the same. “Logistics is the only pain-point with the model. We have six people in the team to handle logistics in each operational city,” adds Ankit.
The startup plans to add a new source city with multiple restaurants at regular intervals. In the near future, it will add popular items of famous food outlets in Delhi like kebabs from Karims, paranthes from Paranthe Wali Gali, kachoris from Jaipur, Arsalan’s Biryani, sweets and authentic fish curry from Kolkata etc. “We will shift the delivery model to an all-day delivery rather than the current three days a week and add sweets and confectionaries to our existing offerings,” says Ankit.
As it scales up, logistics will be a big challenge for FlyMyFood in the future. What do you think? Do comment below.
