Rashmi Sahijwala never expected to start working at the age of 59, let alone join India’s gig economy, but she is now part of an army of housewives turning their homes into “cloud kitchens” to feed time-starved millennials.
Asia’s third-largest economy is battling a slowdown so sharp that it is creating a drag on global growth, the IMF said on Monday, but there are some bright spots.
The gig economy, aided by cheap mobile data and abundant labor, has flourished in India, opening up new markets across the vast nation.
Photo: AFP
Although Indian women have long battled for access to education and employment opportunities, the biggest hurdle for many is convincing conservative families to let them leave home.
However, new apps such as Curryful, Homefoodi and Nanighar are tapping the skills of housewives to slice, dice and prepare meals for hungry urbanites from the comfort of their homes.
The so-called “cloud kitchens” — restaurants that have no physical presence and a delivery-only model — are rising in popularity, as there is a boom in food delivery apps such as Swiggy and Zomato.
“We want to be the Uber of home-cooked food,” said Ben Mathew, who launched Curryful in 2018, convinced that housewives were a huge untapped resource.
His company — which employs five people for the app’s daily operations — works with 52 women and three men, and the 31-year-old Web entrepreneur hopes to get 1 million female chefs onboard by 2022.
“We usually train them in processes of sanitization, cooking, prep time and packaging ... and then launch them on the platform,” Mathew said.
One of the first housewives to join Curryful shortly after its launch in November 2018, Sahijwala was initially apprehensive, despite having four decades of experience in the kitchen.
However, backed by her children, she took the plunge.
Since then, she has undergone a crash course in how to run a business, from creating weekly menus to buying supplies from wholesale markets to cut costs.
The learning curve was steep and Sahijwala switched from cooking everything from scratch to preparing curries and batters for breads in advance to save time and limit leftovers.
She even bought a massive freezer to store fruits and vegetables, despite her husband’s reservations about the cost.
“I told him that I am a professional now,” she said.
In her Mumbai kitchen, Sahijwala is elated to have embarked on a career at an age when her contemporaries are eyeing retirement.
Over the past year, she has seen her profit grow to US$200 a month, but more importantly, she said: “My passion has finally found an outlet. I am just glad life has given me this chance.”
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