Swiggy woos millennials with ‘home-cooked meals’, pilot under way in Chennai

The delivery platform plans to add the ‘home-style meals’ cooked not at restaurants but by ‘home chefs.’ Vivek Sunder, COO, Swiggy, said the pilot for this approach is under way in a few cities, including Chennai.

This is an attempt by the company to further tweak its business model to meet the growing demand by ‘working millennials.’ For instance, in a metro like Chennai, the preference is skewed towards heavy meals while in Ahmedabad, the demand is for snacks, he said.

The target for the new model, Sundar said, are millennials, who are busy with their work life but want to stick to simple, homely meals. “We have a pilot under way. Consumers, living 500 miles away from their mothers, can now get food that is closest to what their mothers would make at home,” the top executive said.

A home-chef needs only a licence and a registration to join the platform, Sunder said, not delving into details.

He also sought to point out the necessity to innovate. A month after Zomato acquired Uber Eats for Rs 2,485 crore, the MNC struggled with customising itself to meet domestic requirements, he said.

“Apart from the fact that Uber Eats entered India when they were already two established companies in the food delivery platform, Uber Eats suffered from what some multi-national companies I know have been struggling with— how do you run a global company and yet be able to customise for the unique needs of the country?” said Sunder, while speaking on disruptions in the food industry at an event organised by FICCI FLO here on Tuesday.

Elaborating on the ease of doing business as a domestic company, Sunder said, “If I have a problem and need to change a few things in our functioning, I can simply approach my tech team and they won’t have to ask me to put it in the queue because they have requests from 40 other countries as is the case with global companies.”

“The edge that global companies have are scale, sophistication and capital. Indian companies, on the other hand, have the exact opposite: the ability to customise,” Sunder added.