HYDERABAD: Snack consumption has gone up in the last four months than ever before and that can easily be blamed on the ‘stay home stay safe’ policy that everyone has adopted.
With more and more folks staying at home due to online classes or virtual offices, the demand for snacks that can be stored has spiked in the last five months and so have orders online.
The need to have packaged sweets and savouries from reputed brands that boast of tamper-proof packing and made in sterile machines has made most consumers embrace online ordering of snacks.
Not surprisingly, there have been a slew of apps and websites which facilitate snacks, not just from your city from across the country.
One of the recent entrants into this is The State Plate, which promises to bring snacks of every Indian state under one umbrella.
The new e-commerce platform which sells traditional dry snacks from states across India is the brainchild of Muskaan Sancheti and Raghav Jhawar. From Karnataka’s kodbale, to Rajasthan’s Bhujia, and Indore’s Laung Sev, the duo has been making sure that these are home-delivered within three days across India.
The co-founders, whose family roots are in Rajasthan, hit upon the idea sometime in June, realising the market for snacks was unorganised. “Many vendors who were selling snacks were passing off leftover stocks and had hiked prices drastically,” says Sancheti. When she brought up this issue with Jhawar, who is currently in Kolkata, they realised there was a large scope for organising this business.
“People usually stock up on annual stock of snacks, which is usually done in summer. But this year, that was not possible,” says Sancheti, adding that they started their market research in June and were ready to launch in July. The bootstrapped venture was started with initial investment coming from their savings and college internships. They were later funded by their parents.
Like any other venture, they too faced initial hiccups. “We are right now storing around 60 per cent of the snacks that are listed. The rest are procured from the vendor. During the lockdown, we faced logistic and transport issues, and since many factories were closed, they had only leftover stocks.
If you are a Hyderabadi living in another city or state and are craving for the local Karachi biscuits, websites like The State Plate enable it. We supply in Hyderabad and consumers may have to bear the courier costs until we finalise our process of integrating courier partners directly on our website,” says Raghav.
Hyderabadis are already actively ordering on those like sweetkaramcoffee.in which even has special ones like herbal chikkis, millet-based vegan snacks and sugar-free ones besides delicacies from across the country. Apparently, sitting in Hyderabad, you can order Coimbatore’s Kai Murukkus and Kannur’s Sarkarai Upperi in Hyderabad.
The website is well integrated that as you are checking out their list of snacks, there is a gentle prompt which says ‘Someone just ordered 4 packets of kai murukku,’ making you go for it that very instant. Most consumers prefer to directly order from such snacks than from regular e-commerce sites as these sites typically sources it from the reputed snack houses.
More apps, more choice
There a host of others like DelightFoods, Ammammas.in and Mirchi.com which deliver specialised pickles, sweets and traditional savouries via orders on WhatsApp and accept payments via Google Pay. Poornima Mital from Hyderabad of Mirchi can help you get Aatreyapuram Pootarekhulu to Mathura Peda via her venture in Hyderabad.