Ever tried cooking a healthy pasta, salad with a tempting dressing and crunchy greens or grilled vegetables that won’t turn soggy?
One may have chef’s recipes but for the dish to turn out perfectly, one also needs suitable cookware and kitchen appliances that make cooking easy, quick, healthy and convenient.
But then women who cook daily rarely get appreciation for their skill. This lack of appreciation makes cooking appear like an unending chore. Add to this another scenario where India has become the diabetes capital of the world. With rise in incomes, people eat more junk food, leading to unhealthy weight gain and various lifestyle diseases.
“Looking at such scenarios, we conceived ‘Wonderchef - Cook with Pride Home Appliances’. We wanted to nurture appreciation for cooking skill and focus on importance of cooking food in a healthy way,” said Ravi Saxena, managing director, Wonderchef.
Mr. Saxena, an engineer and entrepreneur, and celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor collaborated and launched the company 10 years ago with the aim to empower women. “All our products support healthy, tastier, convenient and faster cooking as women are getting busier with various vocations and activities even if they don’t step out to work,” they shared with The Hindu on Saturday.
The duo focused on developing premium and innovative products. But keeping them on retail shelves will not have helped unless women understood how to use them. “So we started asking them to use our products and market them if they had a good experience. The concept of direct-to-home (DTH) sales network, which started 10 years ago, now has over 62,000 women members in 1,200 cities across India,” they said.
“Our target is to strengthen that network and fulfil the goal of providing income generating opportunities to over one lakh women by 2020,” Mr. Saxena added. The DTH network enables women to work as per their convenience and demonstrate how to make healthy recipes with Wonderchef cookware to small groups of women at their homes and earn commission on their sales. Women members earn anywhere between ₹2,000-4,000 to ₹1 lakh based on the number of days they work a month.
Mr. Kapoor explained appliances are developed scientifically for various concepts of cooking like grilling pan, Sanjeev Kapoor Tandoor where extra oil will not be absorbed, salad maker/spinner that helps in dressing and dries washed greens to keep them crisp, turbo choppers etc.
“Indians are travelling a lot these days and more people want to experiment and taste local food and try recipes with indigenous ingredients once they get back home. Wonderchef enriches people with knowledge of healthy and convenient cooking through its recipes as well as cookware,” they said.
At a conference attended by 300 women entrepreneurs here on Saturday, the company launched two products — steamer with steel jar and steel bottles for the fridge as people are moving away from plastic products for health reasons.
Those interested in engaging themselves in the DTH network can register through the website, www.wonderchef.com
