Chefling Kitchen

A platform to connect home cooks to the growing home/office food delivery market. This solution will enable women to cash their cooking skill set, work from home, connect to the internet and get financially independent.

A web marketplace for women home cooks to sell their culinary magic of local food to those looking for healthy, hygienic home cooked food delivered to their homes or offices. A platform that helps women promote there food skills to a wider audience and help them gain economical independence. Women with help of our team place their speciality cooked dishes for orders on the Facebook group (Website will be live in second stage) and Chefling Kitchen promotes their dish, take orders and deliver to the customers.Payments are transferred to their digital accounts.   

This solution helps women get better opportunity to earn with dignity and allows access to technology, improves access to financial system. The project helps women in underserved communities across the world allowing them to utilise the cooking skills.   

Women hold the key to food culture in any society! Women have an amazing skill set of cooking delectable local cuisine and for various reasons including family care can not step out of their homes. On the other hand, home cooked food vs. fast food demand is growing because of increasing health consciousness. Even if they start their home food businesses, the other big challenge is they lack marketing and digital skills to increase the reach of their business and attract enough customers.  

Giving women an opportunity to earn for themselves from the comfort of their home allows them to get economically independant. In the pilot run of our project, we were able to create earning opportunity of $500 for the two women working regularly in one month. When men in the family see women contribution we saw a clear shift in their support. One of our home cook's husband now supports her in full business operation like procurement of groceries etc. Our vendors also now use internet to see feedback received on their food.

• Create earning opportunities for women in underserved communities 
• Increase technology inclusion by enabling the women to use technology to earn for themselves 
• Women from any age group looking to make money from their cooking skills can get on the marketplace and sell their food 
• The website is an easy SMS enabled platform where women with help of our team can place their delicious home cooked food and rest will be managed by the team in delivery, marketing, invoicing and payments.  

Track orders placed - 500 orders per vendor after 2 months of operation

Check the Google Analytics and sales funnel - Website visits with a growth of 10-20%

Track the quality of food through tasting and shortlisting to select best - On boarding of additional 2 quality home cooks per month

We believe our solution is solving the challenge from many different angles including improving digital connectivity, increasing access to digital payments, creating new markets, supply chain and also solving the bias of women not being able to contribute to the income. This holistic approach baked with strong  and simple technology support helps us in addressing the needs of the market.  

We are dealing with women who have little to no digital literacy, we are utilising messaging services SMS as main form of communication with our home chefs i.e. from order placement to delivery to feedback. We use bilingual messaging. This system is embedded in our platform so when an order is placed an SMS is sent to home cooks. Whereas our technology savvy consumers will have access to the website. In next phase, these women will be given an easy to use app access to manage their orders, place their dishes and mark the prices 

It is a web enabled product and can be accessed through internet. The pilot project utilises Facebook group and page to connect home chefs to marketplace.We curate the daily menu, do postings, promote the meals, take in order via whatsap or our hotline. We then deliver it through our delivery partner. The internet and SMS are cheap to access in Pakistan. You can get a $5 card to run internet and messaging for whole month.    

We are bootstrapping at the moment and looking for funds to grow and scale the business. Since this is a transactional model, we take 20 percent of from the home chefs to cover up for our costs or marketing and management. If we scale it to 1000 orders in a month majority of the costs will be covered.  

Women needs to be given the training to understand the food business dynamics. A basic training course that can run them through the basics of health, hygiene, pricing, standardisation processes will help them strengthen and compete against other food delivery.  

https://www.facebook.com/cheflingkitchenpk/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1716868651663761/

Solve will give us the insights from international community and mentors. Work on the solution to help us think in a more holistic manner and gain ideas to improve upon our idea. We are working with women who are talented but are very limited in their knowledge of technology or business and we want to ensure that our processes in Chefling Kitchen make that transition the easiest for them.    

• UN Women Pakistan
• Jazz Cash (the largest digital payment platform in Pakistan)

Umi Kitchen