Cookups - earn money cooking from home

Homecooked with love. 

Women make up 50% of the population yet only 30% of the official labor force and 10% of entrepreneurs in Bangladesh.   Like many developing countries with a conservative bias, women face numerous social, legal and economic barriers to greater participation. They are pressured into early marriages and childrearing, and struggle to get back into the workforce once they do.  Confined to the home, they lack effective avenues to earn a living and develop marketable skills, thereby becoming dependent on their husbands and families.

Cookups is a homemade food delivery service that connects home cooks of all socioeconomic backgrounds to diners who want a taste of home. We have our own delivery service and cater to over 15,000 diners from 800 cooks thus creating income opportunities for women - mostly stay-at-home moms who lack other avenues to earn.  Technology is a powerful way to empower these women, by leveraging their existing skills in making delicious food from their own recipes to the growing legions of digitally native urban consumers who are tired of repetitive restaurant fare.  It's highly scalable, and highly impactful, because we provide these women with the tools to become entrepreneurs - marketing, business skills, and in the case of low-income women, even literacy training so they can use the apps themselves - all from the comfort of their own kitchen.

Cookups marries age old traditions with cutting edge technology. This is the first time the sharing economy has been used in the context of food, particularly to empower disadvantaged women who are confined to the home. The online food delivery business is growing now, but the homemade market is still untapped and we are creating it for Southeast Asia.

Technology is how we connect diners to home cooks. Our online platform is also where all the transactions happen, as Cooks post their dishes on our application and website, which the diners browse and order. We use an online wallet to facilitate transactions and payments to cooks.

We want to get to 2000 registered home cooks and process 18,000 orders a month. We want to expand to two new cities within Bangladesh, and at least one other country within the region. We are growing into new verticals such as CookupsX (affordable office lunches), CookupsFit (healthy meals), Growups (produce direct from farmers) and a commercial kitchen that will help support catering and other large orders.  On the financial side, we are raising a seed round of $200,000 and looking to do $220,000 in sales. We have also entered into a partnership to take the app to France. 

We want to train and reach out to the lower income housewives of Bangladesh, provide them with literacy training as well as training on recipes, customer service etc so that they are able to sustain themselves and earn an income while working from home. We plan to do road shows throughout the country to reach these women. It is also important to highlight success stories as this will give more women confidence, seeing that others who are not so different from them being able to sustain themselves with a meaningful income.

Through online marketing alone, we receive up to 1000 sign ups a month from urban housewives looking to earn an income. Along with online marketing, we plan to go on road shows, host events and organize competitions to reach more urban housewives, or potential cooks.  

We have over 850 registered cooks serving 15,000 unique customers. Our app has also been downloaded over 20,000 times. 

We expect to reach 2000 registered cooks next year who will be earning an average income of $500 a month (national average earnings for women is $200). As a result of this, we will see a lot more women contributing to the national economy. But the greater effect this will have, is that their financial independence will give them more agency over decisions that affect their own lives as well as those of their children. 

Namira Hossain - CEO - a journalist covering women's issues. 

Misha Ali - Co-Founder - a U Penn grad with years of experience working in startups like Bikroy, the largest Bangladeshi classifieds site.

Irfan Ahmed - CMO - has a background in consulting and start-ups. 

As a team our strengths and weaknesses complement each other. We work around the clock. We record and observe every bit of data, we quickly adapt to situations based on what we have collected and we work tirelessly towards the same goal - get sales for our Cooks.

We earn revenue through commissions - we charge 15% on each portion, as well as delivery charges on each order - which is shared by the Cook and the diner. Additionally, we also earn through monthly subscriptions for our Cooks, and onboarding fees for each Cook that joins as well as events, such as pop-up fairs and restaurants. 

The market size for online food delivery in Bangladesh is $25 million a year with a 70% growth now. Even if grows at 30% on average then this market will be worth $150 million in 5 years. There are 11 million housewives in urban areas in Bangladesh, who are all potential Cooks. On average, people spend 50% of their income on food in Bangladesh, as opposed to 20% on transportation. Which means that we are competing in a potential market that is far bigger than even Uber.

We are self-taught, first-time entrepreneurs who've stumbled upon a market.  We started as a facebook group among friends who wanted to share recipes and and share food. Now it's one of the fastest-growing Bangladeshi start-ups. 

As we grow, we need access to mentors, peers and investors, particularly impact investors who appreciate our work for women and are willing to provide patient capital so we can grow without losing our effectiveness in serving them.  MIT is a premier institution for impact-oriented technology, and Solve can open its many doors to us.

Key barriers include lack of education in the market about issues such as quality and logistics, particularly as we scale and our operations become more and more complex. We have done very well in marketing and sales, but need to upgrade our back-end. We anticipate that Solve has many experts in this field and through being associated with an institution as as MIT, this will give us the credibility and resources to educate the market we want to reach.