In an age where there is a raging debate between eating to live and living to eat, food is always at the top of our minds. Should the choice be between Thai and Chinese or from the diverse cuisines from within our borders itself? As the world shrinks into a global village, there is no dearth of choices to pamper your palate. Yet, our desire to eat is contradicted by the inherent laziness that has seeped into our systems. Getting dressed, driving out and sitting through the meal often seem insurmountable challenges and we decide to pass. It is this that dinein.in looks to overcome, bringing to your doorstep a variety of options just with the click of a mouse!
Log in to their website and it says it all — ‘Your favourite restaurant now home delivered. Click. Order. Eat.’ With their restaurant counter displaying an impressive sixty three joints, they offer an elaborate spread to choose from. Whether you are craving Peshawari delicacies or eggless cakes, they have it all!
A quick chat with Vinit Chordia, Partner/COO, reveals the ‘why’s and ‘how’s of this new business model. “We began when we realised close to 75 per cent of the restaurants we were looking to partner with do not have a delivery service. Even those who did had only a limited reach within the city.” This seemingly obvious gap in the market wasn’t so obvious to begin with! When Vinit and his team were mulling over a potential start up, they looked to identify a gap in supply — something people needed but did not yet have. “The first thing that came to our minds was food!” Vinit says. “We based our head office in Nungambakkam, the very heart of the city, and promise to deliver food anywhere at all. Every area has a fixed minimum value or customers pay an additional delivery charge.”
Pick and choose
The success of Dinein is easy to predict. They offer many restaurant options with just one phone call. Customers can mix and match their dishes, ordering various courses from different restaurants and there is no need to travel across the city to enjoy a scrumptious meal! Yet, the worry of punctuality is always on our minds. Ask Vinit how they overcome this problem and he clarifies, “We have set processes with all our partner restaurants. When an order is placed, they have twenty minutes to hand it over to us and delivery time is predefined according to the distance. Customers are informed of the time of delivery so we do not set any false expectations.”
Surprisingly, for a venture as fresh as Dinein, their marketing strategies have been quiet, if not invisible altogether. Despite this, Vinit is not complaining. “We have had our promotion through the restaurants and social networking sites. Being a start up, we had tight budgets and could not afford extensive marketing campaigns but we have grown tremendously thanks to word of mouth from our customers!”
Dinein.in is wholly owned and run by Easy Commerce, an e-commerce firm specialising in built e-commerce websites. With a target audience of just about anyone who eats, the team is looking to expand out of the city soon, ruing the fact that they hadn’t started earlier. Swearing by the tenets of quality of service and customer experience, Vinit signs off by advising upcoming entrepreneurs to “stick to the basics, focus on your core ideas and always aim for quality of service”.
Visit the initiative at dinein.in or call 044-4910 1010.
