Click for a healthy bite

Why eat the same canteen food or, worse, bother fixing lunch before heading for work when there are online food delivery options?

April 28, 2015 08:12 pm | Updated 08:39 pm IST

Salads or fries the possibilities are endless. Photo: Special Arrangement

Salads or fries the possibilities are endless. Photo: Special Arrangement

Weekday mornings are chaotic in most homes. You are trying to finish off the last part of an important presentation, dashing off for a shower, getting the children ready for school and so on. It leaves you hardly any time to cook a proper lunch and more often than not, you find yourself at the mercy of greasy, oily food that is served at most office cafeterias. Not anymore as there are a whole lot of online food delivery options, across the city.

Adu Rao was in the catering business for almost six years before he decided to set up nutsoversalads, a venture that aims at providing healthy eating options for lunches.

He says: “We decided to start this venture when we noticed people eating unhealthily as a healthier option did not exist. We mainly deal with salads and tweak the menu regularly to ensure we do not repeat a salad in a week.”

“It has picked up well and we have get subscriptions from across the city, including large IT parks. We run a central kitchen. The costs of running an online venture is minimal compared to a stand alone outlet.”

The lack of good breakfast options in Bengaluru spurred friends Ashwin Chandrasekaran, Haripriya Raja and Nikhil Behl to co-found Brekkie, with a mission statement of delivering balanced, wholesome breakfast to your home or office.

Ashwin says, “Since we were not staying at home, we faced the issues most bachelors face in the city — the lack of time to prepare a healthy breakfast. We started Brekkie to provide a good alternative and it has been very successful. I think Bengaluru being a city with such a huge young population helped. We now have customers in all age brackets. We have also set up a customised vending cart parked at 9 main on 100 Feet Road in Indiranagar.”

Prashant Dhubey is an IT professional who orders occasionally from a range of online delivery options. “I am not a subscriber but like the idea of getting fixed meals delivered. It saves me the hassle of going through menus and figuring out what to get to eat. The food is filling and the menu changes every week, so I do not have to worry about eating the same food again and again. Sometimes I have seen the owners delivering the breakfast or lunch package themselves and in really quick time.”

Data analyst V. Arun agrees with Prashant, though he yearns for more options at night.

“I work mostly in the night. I hope that these options are available at night also soon. This city has many people working at night, who run out of options for a good healthy meal.” Food is not the only area where online delivery options are booming. Beverage deliveries are also making a mark. For coffee lovers tired of stale machine coffee, DropKaffe; an online coffee subscription service is a godsend of sorts. Lakshmi Dasaka, the co-founder of the venture says, “It was the result of solving for our own pain. We are coffee lovers. Enjoying a coffee at work was always challenging. The problem gets accentuated especially when you want your coffee for takeaway. It was always a tough to decide whether to carry a cup of coffee back to your desk, or drink it quickly before it gets cold. We started researching for solutions to this problem. In a day and age where e-commerce has a solution for everything, it was almost baffling that nothing existed for coffee delivery. We decided to start DropKaffe, an online coffee service that offers hot and cold coffees and other beverages to our customers on demand. We also offer cafe style food and quick bites that can be paired with beverages.”

She adds, “We chose Bengaluru since it is a fusion of modernism and deep-rooted culture and is also one of the centres of coffee in India. It has been a good venture.”

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