A new way of dining
Delhi-based Zelish (the food tech platform geared to personalised kitchen management for home, founded in 2019, and has since spread to Delhi, Mumbai, and other major metros) is being acquired by Chef Sanjeev Kapoor’s voice-first culinary AI platform Tinychef in its entirety (staff and assets), spelling good news for foodies across the diaspora, given Tinychef ’s now global presence.
Tinychef, co-founded by Bahubali Shete, Asha Shete and Chef Kapoor, already has over a million users and over 100,000 active monthly users in India and, within a month of its recent launch, it garnered over 25,000 users in North America with the bulk of the user base belonging to the US and Canadian markets.
Meanwhile, Zelish is a personalised kitchen management app that helps you plan, shop and cook your daily meals, offering a way for people of all walks of life to plan their meals, shop ingredients with a single click and makes cooking easier by providing step-by-step guided instructions to make the dish.
As Covid-19 has had a crash diet-like effect on people’s diets, as well as food purchasing patterns, it still presents the fear of disruptions in the food supply chain. This may have caused an increase in the quality and quantity of food bought by households, with tech solutions becoming ever more common.
Saakshi Jain, Co-Founder, Zelish, explains, “Most people who manage the kitchen complain that there is a constant back and forth between operating their phones and managing the said tasks and with this acquisition people will soon be able to relish the Zelish experience on voice assistants like Alexa instead of going back and forth on recipe videos. “The coming together of these two AI-powered companies will give them a distinct edge. Zelish gives Tinychef a powerful app with a highly engaged user base,” she adds.
Essentially, this new alliance gives Zelish a chance to integrate with Tinychef ’s voice-assisted, Alexa enabled, handsfree cooking service, as the latter now aids everything from automatic meal planning to 1-click grocery shopping, voiceguided cooking and the use of connected appliances.
“Going forward, we will help our users with one of the most asked features, i.e. handsfree cooking. Our users can discover, plan and shop on the app, and they can take the cook using the guided mode on smart speaker devices. Not just that, we have widened our recipe and cuisine base,” adds Jain, concluding, “We now have authentic recipes from master chefs like Sanjeev Kapoor, spanning across 16+ cuisine options like Indian, Asian, Continental, American, Mexican cuisine. We currently have over 60,000 recipes on the platform. This integration will help us widen our footprint to North America.”