When he launched Khao Gali in 2016, Anujj Mehta wanted to showcase authentic food from different parts of India and the world to denizens of Gurgaon. More importantly, he wanted to shine the spotlight on home chefs in the condominium dotting the city’s landscape. Within a few months, the brand had clients in over 83 condominiums in Gurgaon.
Soon, he realised the need to make the online platform more organised for home chefs and customers and the brand was revitalised as Hey Homie. He tells Hotelier India how it has grown over the past five years, some learnings along the way and plans for the future.
What learnings from Khao Gali did you employ in Hey Homie?
Everything about Hey Homie originates from Khao Gali, whether it is about understanding a home chef’s mindset or priorities. In most cases, family is on top of this list, and they pursue food as a passion or hobby.
Therefore, it is crucial to understand their challenges, aspirations, and limitations while staying a business and their support to grow and deal with customer feedback. Similarly, it is vital to understand a foodie’s expectations price point preferences and position the value of a home-cooked meal over food from a commercial kitchen.
I learned this from thousands of chefs and users over the years, validating how we ran our business. Typically, people conduct market surveys before launching a company; we threw ourselves into the game and understood the challenges by living it day in and day out for over five years.
Many players had forayed into the home-cooked food market, and most of them were unable to scale it. The past five years gave me insight into how Hey Homie intends to do it successfully.
What gave you the confidence that this app would succeed?
I had begun work on the documentation and other things before March 2020, but the pandemic validated my belief about investing time and money into this project. It highlighted the essence of eating healthy, hygienic and home-cooked food when many people found it challenging to cook at home.
Business in the home chef space never had a community mindset, which we embraced. Today, we have around 3000 chefs on the platform, and their business shot up exponentially, as did their menus as they started experimenting.
A contemporary home chef thinks like the operator of a commercial kitchen. For them, menu innovation and presentation is essential, as is taking feedback and managing payment. Since they aspire to grow their business, subscription-based businesses (like weekly or monthly meals) are imperative. These aspirations notwithstanding, they lacked the right platform to run everything, which Hey Homie could provide.
How user-friendly is Hey Homie’s UI?
It’s easy to become a home chef but keeping at this business and amplifying the entrepreneurship is something we want to help our homies with. Our Seller-first platform helps them decide when to start selling and how to inflate their reach in an efficient and time-saving manner.
Moreover, it aids them with customer acquisition, lets them customise their menus and gives them complete control over their products and how they wish to sell the items.
Additionally, we offer the flexibility of the number of days they wish to operate and provide them with end-to-end logistics. Payments on our platform are credited in real-time, making it a financially viable option.
We also have a Whatsapp-first approach for a hassle-free experience for non-tech savvy users and foodies who do not want cumbersome food ordering processes using an app. We also plan to get professional gourmet chefs to guide beginner home chefs to chisel their culinary skills further.
Do you charge home chefs a commission for orders placed?
Hey Homie offers a free trial for a month, and if a chef recommends it to 10 or more chefs, they get an extension of another 30 days. We have kept the association cost after the trial period low to keep the platform affordable.
We have a fixed monthly fee for professional and established chefs. The HomieStudio feature enables them to make videos and promote their recipes, dishes and products professionally, helping them scale their business better.
We focus on giving an online identity to every chef by hosting their website through Hey Homie. Thus, they can promote themselves as brand names, and customers can search them by name without going through our official website. We also give our chefs a digital identity to connect directly with customers for future orders.
The home cooking segment is highly fragmented and disorganised. Is it easy to bring these entrepreneurs under a more organised network?
Although we are a seller-centric platform, we are a foodie-centric platform since we follow a community-led model from a consumption perspective. When you buy within communities, you give feedback, and that’s where the journey of that chef comes into play.
Hence, we, too, have food testers. So every time a new chef comes onboard, they have a section where they extend a food test to a group of foodies within the condominiums for free. This also allows the chef to get honest reviews before launching their product.
We have rating and feedback systems and a wall that shows the number of orders clocked by each home chef. This becomes a validation platform for foodies who can buy from a chef with the right metrics in place.
Do you help these chefs get certifications like FSSAI to build customer confidence?
Our platform has a link with references for people keen to register for FSSAI on the government site. While recommend and help home chefs get this certification, the responsibility of getting it lies with them. A home chef without an FSSAI certification cannot sell on our platform.
Will you also help them create pop-ups at hotels and restaurants for food festivals?
Yes, so we intend to do pop-up festivals. Initially, this can be done within their communities as people are still more comfortable doing things within their vicinity than venturing out. So we will keep them within the condominiums and later scale this initiative.
