Relisted unearths hidden home chefs, bakers and bartenders in Delhi

How many of us have amazing home cooks within our network? How many of us have wished we could order in some more sophisticated food for house parties? How many of us have gotten a beautiful cake custom-made by a talented baker for one of our friends’ birthdays? Quite a few, I presume.

The demand for customized home food has grown considerably over the last two years. Spoilt for choice, we have more meticulously planned parties, events and get-togethers, a big part of which is unique, catered food.

Relisted is a curated directory of great home chefs, caterers, home bakers, and bartenders in Delhi. It aims to inject some structure into the space by highlighting tried and tested vendors, who usually remain undiscovered, and giving them opportunities to shine.

Inception

Relisted is powered by a four-member team, based out of Delhi. The members are Rohit Pillai (Co-founder, MBA, with over seven years’ experience in relationship management and business development for brands like Citigroup, Groupon and a boutique advertising agency), Shambhavi Singh (Co-founder, 10 years experience in marketing and communications, and has recently worked with a boutique creative agency), Akhil Wable (Co-founder, graduate of CMU, one of Facebook’s early engineers, where he was Head of Search Product & Infrastructure; also co-founded Cove, which was eventually acquired by Dropbox) and Roshni Chawla (in charge of content and marketing, worked in PR for top lifestyle clients, headed communications at a French consulting company and then led the communications and client servicing department at a well-known sports marketing firm).

The founders are avid foodies. They realized that there was a need for a directory that allowed users to directly access high-quality vendors. Portals like Foodcloud do not allow customers to connect with home chefs; the chefs’ contact details are not accessible. Well-known names such as Faaso’s are turning into chef aggregators. There are platforms for home chefs to send meals (Holachef and Yumist), but the founders of Relisted were interested in curating high-quality caterers and bartenders – essential cogs in the organization of any event or celebration.

Rohit says, “Relisted started off as a small project to make our own lives easier, since we love playing host to people. But as we built it up, and got others to use it, we realized that it had the potential to take the entire unorganized F&B and event space, and organize it under one roof. To back our beliefs with some data, we built a basic product.”

Various filters, including cost, size of event, and cuisine, have been put on the portal, to help the consumer zero in on the right choices. The portal went live a month ago. The trio have seed funded their endeavor, and continue to improve the portal, based on feedback from customers. The project already has more than 300 vendors listed, and there are 50 more waiting in the ranks.

Now and the future

The team used multiple channels to identify potential vendors; recommendations from family and friends, publications with relevant articles, articles trending on social media food groups. Each vendor has been verified by the team. They have even ranked their vendors using a blue star (‘our favourites’). The team believes that once they gain some traction, they will think about what comes next. For now, they want to remain in Delhi and establish their base there. They’re considering adding new verticals, like decorations, lighting, table linen, and setting up tents, for example. Currently, the portal has three verticals – Chefs and Caterers, Cakes and Desserts, and Bartenders. The founders hope that the portal can be developed into a one-stop place for parties and events.

The team faced a few challenges at the start. It was difficult to reach out to vendors, given that the task involved calling 300+ individuals. Sometimes calls and emails were unanswered as contact details were erroneous, or had simply changed. Finding sources was not difficult, as the number of home chefs is increasing steadily. It took four-five months to concretize the concept.

As for future plans, the founders say, “Relisted continues to grow and evolve, beyond what we had initially imagined. We continue to invest our time and energy into helping it grow, while continuing to look for additions to our team who could help Relisted realize its larger potential.”