Start-up of the week: For foodies, happiness is just an exotic DIY meal-kit away

There are many who like to cook some gourmet delicacies at home but give-up even before they start, due to lack of necessary ingredients. Three youngsters from the city – Anush Rajasekaran, Abishek Chandrasekaran and Harshitha Ravi have come up with a solution for those who like to cook their food, but want to save themselves a trip to the store. Their venture, Ordook is a subscription-based service that makes DIY meal kits, with recipes that makes gourmet cooking easier.

“The Do It Yourself meal kit is popular abroad and we realised that there is a huge scope for this business here,” says Anush, who worked in an ad agency earlier. With his friends Harshitha, who is a finance professional, and Abishek, a former techie, he took the chance to start Ordook in April 2016. 

“Ours is a subscription-based service based only in Chennai. The box contains the ingredients and recipes. We have two options: The first is the two-meal kit for Rs 300, which serves two and customers can choose from 10 exotic recipes every week. The other is a four-meal kit, priced at Rs 250 per meal kit. The kits come with their recipe booklets as well,” says Anush. Customers can choose from a variety of popular cuisines such as desi, Chinese and Thai cuisines. “We have an in-house chef Swetha R, who has helped us design the recipes in a way that you can cook the food in under 25 minutes.” Though only a few months old, they are bootstrapped. “The initial investment was from our family. It took us approximately Rs 6 lakh to start the venture and now we are doing well. We haven’t done started advertising yet. It’s only through word of mouth that we are getting customers. We are considering approaching investors as we have plans to expand,” says Anush.