We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tanvi Kansara a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Tanvi, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear the backstory of how you established your own practice.

In 2020, when most of the world’s population was confined to their homes due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, many people had to endure some unpleasant and unique experiences that our last few generations never had to go through.

Being stuck at home can be challenging for many people, but it’s been especially difficult for me as a food lover. I’m used to being able to go out and try different cuisines from all over the world, but now that we’re all stuck at home, I’ve had to get creative with my meal options. One silver lining has been getting to know my neighbours better as we’ve started sharing recipes and meals. Even though this has been a great way to try new things, I still crave more variety.

After a couple of weeks, a few home chefs started a WhatsApp group where they could announce their expertise in different cuisines and take cooking requests from other members. This way, they could help each other with new recipes and ideas and get feedback on their own cooking.

The process was relatively straightforward – the members would have to tell what they wanted to eat, and home chefs in the group would take care of the rest by cooking it and then delivering it right to their doorstep. Payment could be made either in cash or via online transfer, depending on what was more convenient for the customer.

I joined a group of home chefs in my city by reference from one of my friends and saw a lot of potential for what could be done. This is also where I met Shital Katte, our Food Next Door co-founder. She’s a fantastic cook, especially when it comes to chicken recipes.

We were impressed with the enthusiasm of the group members when we ordered from them, and we realized that they could reach a larger audience if they scaled up their operation. We found that many people in our city are looking for healthy foods but still want to try different cuisines and tastes.

Home-cooked food by home chefs who have a mastery of authentic cuisines can solve the problem of unhealthy and impersonal restaurant food if we can deliver healthy and personalized home food that meets the customer’s dietary requirements.

With this idea, we met with all home chefs after getting a break from the lockdown. We asked them about their challenges and how we could help them expand their cooking to a larger audience. Our goal was to replace unhealthy outside food habits with healthy, personalized home food. By helping our home chefs, we can make a difference in the way society eats!

We gathered a few pain points that home chefs discussed and started working on how we could solve these challenges using technology. This is where Food Next Door (https://www.foodnextdoor.in/ ) was founded.

When we first started out, we found it very difficult to get everything up and running – especially since we didn’t have any expertise in technology, logistics or marketing. I had experience in business operations, but nothing that was directly applicable to this venture. We weren’t sure how we would onboard the home-chefs onto our platform, or how to communicate with them effectively since they weren’t very tech-savvy. All of the home-chefs were experts in their own cuisines, but not so good at creating menus, profiles or taking pictures. We had to make sure that all of the content on our site was curated and professional.

We learned a lot of lessons during the process and if we had known this information beforehand, we could have done things differently. The most important lesson we learned was that you need to start with whatever you have and do your best. There is nothing like a ‘complete’ or perfect product or service. The other lesson we learned is that not everyone is our customer and we should be focusing on a specific segment where there is a need.

Our best advice for young professionals, based on our experience, is to start talking to customers as soon as possible. Don’t wait for perfection – it’s a myth. Clearly identify your target audience and focus your energies on reaching them instead of trying to attract everyone. You’ll be more successful that way.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We have created a mobile app that allows customers to order healthy food from all available master home chefs in the city. With this app, you can deliver healthy and delicious food right to your doorstep!

Our home chefs also have convenient mobile apps to help manage their menus, profiles, and payments and receive new customer orders. This makes it easier than ever before to keep track of everything and to get new business.

We currently work with over 200 home chefs in three cities to deliver healthy, home-cooked food to customers based on their dietary needs and requests. We only use fresh and healthy ingredients in our meals, and each dish is specially prepared for each customer to ensure they get the nutrition they need.

We allow our customers to specify any dietary requests they may have with their order, such as no salt, oil, sugar, or certain spices. Our home chefs always cook according to the requests.

We hope to have our startup delivering healthy home food and other necessary items to major cities in India by this time next year. We also want to work with a few partners to begin our services in other countries.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

When we started out, we found it very difficult to get everything up and to run – especially since we didn’t have any expertise in technology, logistics or marketing. I had business operations experience but nothing directly applicable to this venture. We weren’t sure how we would onboard the home chefs onto our platform or how to communicate with them effectively since they weren’t very tech-savvy. The home chefs were experts in their cuisines but not so good at creating menus, profiles or taking pictures. We had to ensure that all of our site’s content was curated and professional.

We learned a lot of lessons during the process; if we had known this information beforehand, we could have done things differently. The most important lesson we learned was that you need to start with whatever you have and do your best. There is nothing like a ‘complete’ or perfect product or service. The other lesson we learned is that not everyone is our customer, and we should focus on a specific segment with a need.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

A few home chefs started a WhatsApp group where they could announce their expertise in different cuisines and take cooking requests from other members. This way, they could help each other with new recipes and ideas and get feedback on their cooking.

The process was relatively straightforward – the members would have to tell what they wanted to eat, and home chefs in the group would take care of the rest by cooking it and then delivering it right to their doorstep. Payment could be made either in cash or via online transfer, depending on what was more convenient for the customer.

I joined a group of home chefs in my city by reference from one of my friends and saw a lot of potential for what could be done. This is also where I met Shital Katte, our Food Next Door co-founder. She’s a fantastic cook, especially when it comes to chicken recipes.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.foodnextdoor.in/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fndindia/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FoodNextDoorIndia/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanvikansara/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/foodnextdoor_1
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPGP1VBGPtSb-5YqAyMdKvw

Image Credits
Yes, we have full rights on these images, and we own the ownership. Tanvi Kansara