If you hate cooking, the current lockdown can be a nightmare. For those who love experimenting with food, this period can be fun.
Still, there will be certain kitchen realities to be dealt with, first up. Zelish, a Bengaluru-based start-up, has launched a kitchen management application to help people manage their kitchen better and help them prepare meals for the family with the available items at home. The app helps people plan their meals, shop for groceries or communicate with their cook on what they need on the menu.
By understanding all the food preferences including the dietary restrictions of a family, this app comes up with a personalised menu. Based on selections made by the user, a shopping list with all the ingredients is offered.
“As a pilot for the app, we were helping source cooks for people and this helped us understand some of the challenges double-income households may face,” says Saakshi Jain, one of the co-founders; others are Rakesh Edavalath and Arpit Joseph. The three are former colleagues at MyGate.
They later did a survey where they found that variety was a constant challenge in the kitchen as they did not know how to explain to the cook what has to be done or the cook had little time to explore new dishes. “Even if you have a domestic help they sometimes ask for too many ingredients that sometimes may not help the busy lifestyle of working professionals. We took all these factors into account, while designing the app,” says Saakshi.
More than a thousand curated recipes along with step-by-step cooking instructions with videos are also made available.
Currently, grocery is delivered to users in Bangalore. Saakshi says the app was launched on April 1 and they are thrilled with the response. “The lockdown came to our advantage. More than 500 of our users are from Chennai, mainly from gated communities,” says Saakshi, adding that our aim is to offer recipes as homely as possible.
For details, visit https://www.zelish.in.
