Foraging for Indian food on the world wide web….

The Indian web industry is increasingly getting egalitarian. What started out with a sprinkling of technology centric products & services is now being used to solve common urban day-to-day problems. It’s something of a turning point in its evolution, since this trend make a departure from blindly aping the western examples (in creating copies of foreign websites, which were essentially designed to solve foreign problems) to creating web delivered solutions that solve unique Indian problems. To substantiate this assertion, check out the bunch of startups (in various stages of their evolution) that have blossomed to help urban Indians with their food needs. This is a unique problem for urbanised Indians (whether in India or abroad). As young (and financially independent) working people get used to living alone (and away from their doting, ‘stuffing-food-down-your-throat’ parents), one of the things they have to learn to manage is food- how to manage their daily need, how to discover new, exotic cuisines that pamper their taste buds, how to find restaurants or tiffin services that will deliver subsistence level, decently palatable food to their door-steps etc. The web is slowly coming to the rescue on many such occassions.

HungryBangalore (order food on the web) – HB is an online food delivery portal for Bangalore. The website has tied up with numerous food joints in the city and you can look up their respective menus and place the order on the website. The food is delivered directly by the outlet, without HB getting involved there. You can also book a table at these restaurants as also inquire about party bookings. The business model is based partly on advertising and partly on charging the restaurants a small commission of the order amount places through the website.

EatOutZone (listing Indian restaurants across the world)- EatOutZone is a website that aggregates information about eatouts of Indian origin; it provides their addresses, specialities, cuisines, price, menu, promotional offers, location map, photographs & reviews. Not just that, the site also features food related jokes/quotations/trivia, articles about dining etiquettes, details about diff types of F&B.

FoodJugad (bringing food suppliers & cosumers together)- This wesbite is work in progress, but its aim is quite unpretentious; it wants to create an interface between food consumers (i.e. bachelors, professionals, people living far from home, regional food requirements, anybody wants to chose flexible & cost-effective tiffins) and food suppliers (tiffin caterers, restaurants, urban working women who want to run a small local business out of supplying tiffins). It plans to acuate the delivery arm through dabbawalas (unemployed, low skill workers, part time jobs). This site is the effort of a techie who currently works in the IT industry; he is in the process of putting together the whole idea and generate resources to push this forward. The website looks somewhat amateurish at this stage and requires some working upon, nevertheless the core idea cuts through the chase and tries to solve a common problem.

Ifood.tv (online video community for food lovers) IFood.tv is an online food community that was profiled earlier on this blog. It has been started by a bunch of foraging expat Indians in the US. Its forte is Indian food but it has related content from other counties/cultures as well. The site has recipes & video cooking shows, blogs & forums, exotic food listings, info about food shows & events. The usual social networking features have been peppered in as well to spawn a online community around food.

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The converging interest in food is not new at all. There are many popular cookery shows on national television (Tarla Dalal’s show on Sony, Sanjeev Kapoor’s show on ZEETV, The Foodie on TimesNow, MirchMasala on StarTV). Pick up any local classifieds listing magazine- you are sure to find scores of food related advertisements from nearby restaurants, tiffin suppliers etc. What seems to be new is the internet’s role in its delivery, distribution and networking. The internet as a free, ubiquitous, on-demand repository of the long tail of web based solutions has the potential to see it emerge as a game-changer in this space.