TravelKhana reports 17% MoM growth, plans to expand their food service to buses next year

TravelKhana is a marketplace that connects passengers with several restaurants on the Indian Rail network. It offers a variety of choices to a Railway passenger so that the passengers can order food as per their liking. Primarily a technology company, TravelKhana keeps a track of trains in realtime and manages the supply chain in such a way that the passengers get fresh food at the railway station of their choice.

Based out of Delhi, TravelKhana was founded in January 2012 by Pushpinder Singh who is an IT-BHU and BITS Pilani alumnus with about 15 years of experience in the software and technology industry, particularly around developing products. Seeing a gap in the massive Railway industry of India, Pushpinder decided to startup TravelKhana. A need of many, TravelKhana gained traction and at the moment delivers 2000-2500 meals every day. When we interviewed Pushpinder back in April 2012, the service was just getting off the ground with presence in 7 cities and about 50 deliveries a day. TravelKhana now has presence in over 100 cities and more than 135 stations.

TravelKhana has a growing list of vendors catering to needs of the customers coming via the portal. TravelKhana helps vendors and restaurants in terms of effective and efficient fulfillment. It completes an entire fulfillment cycle right from the point of ordering to Delivery, Customer feedback and Reconciliation (the responsibility for logistics is taken by the vendor).

With cash on delivery and presence in over 2000 trains, TravelKhana is quickly gaining ground. It is currently seeing a month on month growth of 17% in terms of orders (the period for which the growth is reported is not clear, might be a recent surge). It has also found investor support with a seed and angel round. The amount has not been disclosed but Palaash Ventures participated in the last round along with a few other individual investors. TravelKhana has a margin of about 20% and is also exploring other revenue streams to grow the business. It has 60 employees at the moment with people across technology, operations and customer support forming the bulk. Pushpinder told us that they're in advanced talks to raise another round of funding very soon to propel their growth.

The mobile side has surpassed the web when it comes to ordering via TravelKhana. They also have an app which has more than 20,000 downloads on Android but connectivity is usually an issue when passengers are trying to order from within a train. To tackle this problem, TravelKhana is working on a technology that will help the customers to order via mobile (app/SMS) even though they are not connected to the internet. This, if executed properly should increase utility to a large extent.

TravelKhana is also working with IRCTC to streamline services, details of which will be revealed at a later stage. Making a foothold in the railways industry, TravelKhana has also been researching on ground and piloting their real time technology for regions in Gurgaon to launch the online food service for buses. The results have been promising and Pushpinder tells us that they'd be rolling out the bus service for five cities from next year.

Solving a very real problem, TravelKhana is an example of a great idea followed by good execution. There are flaws, for instance, one of the trains (Goa-SF Express) on their popular train list has only one vendor for which the minimum food order amount is INR 5000 for one of the scenarios. But this is a one off case and points towards the complexity of the problem- tracking trains in real time, managing vendors accordingly and also keeping the model commercially viable for everyone. The rise of mobile and technology penetration coupled with their growing experience in solving the problem, TravelKhana is creating a lot of value in the ecosystem and is one of the companies to watch out for from India.Website: TravelKhana

This story is a part of the ‘F&B Entrepreneurs’ series presented in association with ‘Chilli Paneer – A DBS Production'.