CHENNAI: Usha started her journey with TinMen in November 2016. She had started her own independent food service before, occasionally providing meals to small offices. While searching for better opportunities, Usha came across TinMen and registered herself as a home chef. When she first started off, she received 7 to 8 orders, but today gets about 50 orders per day. .
Founded in December 2015 by Chaitanya Degala and Mukesh Manda, TinMen is a food delivery app that serves homemade food to users. Our home chefs scout the freshest ingredients to prepare wholesome healthy meals without any additional preservatives, artificial colorants and other unhealthy additives, adds Chaitanya.
With nearly 60 chefs enrolled in the platform thus far, TinMen gets over 1,500 orders a day. It has 15 cuisines on the menu, ranging from Kerala, Andhra, Punjabi, Jain, Bengali, along with international foods such as pastas, salads, etc. The company also claims to take care of all the logistics while the Home Chef only needs to cook. Prices of the dishes range of `65 to `150.
Interestingly, the company also utilises the services of food connoisseurs, whose role is to check the quality of ingredients used, taste the dishes, and suggest improvements, if any. “With our convenient meal scheduler, users can schedule meals for a whole week, upload their wallet and receive their food at the same time everyday without any hassles,” says Chaitanya.
TinMen has raised an undisclosed sum from investors such as Lead Angels, Corvus Ventures, Zomato and MAPE Advisory Group. The areas being served in Hyderabad include Madhapur, HITEC City, Jubilee Hills, Kondapur, Kothaguda, Gachibowli, Financial District, Nallagandla, Nanakramguda, Raidurgam, Manikonda, Kukatpally, Hafeezpet, Miyapur, Chandanagar, Banjara Hills, Srinagar Colony, Begumpet
and Panjagutta.
On competitors, Chaitanya says, “InnerChef and Holachef are popular in North India but they have centralised kitchens and limited menus. We curate home chefs on our platform and deliver to users, thereby allowing us to provide several cuisines and over 700 dishes at any given point of time.”
On the possibly competing market share of home-delivery app Swiggy, Mukesh says, “Swiggy is not a direct competitor because Swiggy delivers on demand from restaurants and we deliver homemade food from home chefs, so in that sense they are in different categories.”
Chaitanya Degala had completed his engineering at DA-IICT and worked for CRISIL and Deloitte before heading to Oxford Said Business School for an MBA in Finance. Mukesh Manda is an engineer from IIT Kharagpur. On future goals, the team says they are looking to expand to other cities after the first quarter of 2018.
1,500-2,000
Orders per day
60
Chefs on
the platform
12 to 15
Cuisines
H65-H150
Prices
4
Food connoisseurs who check quality
Investors
Lead Angels
Corvus Ventures
Zomato
MAPE Advisory Group
Chef case study: Usha
For more details, visit: www.tinmen.in