Hi Amit! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?

I’m a hard-core sales professional and, although I have never worked in the food & beverage sector, I was able to utilize my skills from healthcare in building a new F&B brand.

At the back of my mind was the assumption that if the fundamentals were correct, then the industry didn’t make a difference.

The main idea came into place mainly because my wife is a fantastic cooker, and she was constantly receiving numerous feedbacks from family and friends who had tasted her cooking, telling her she should try to commercialize her passion.

We started brainstorming a few ideas. But we could easily identify a gap in the regular homemade food market, which most of the migrants living in our city (Gurgaon) were missing the most. It is perhaps impertinent to inform you that North Indians usually consume homemade meals including bread, lentils, vegetables, chicken, and meat.

So, after a few weeks, we started The Punjab Kitchen. As the name says, we were specializing in the cuisine from the state of Punjab, which the majority of the people in Delhi NCR are familiar with.

The business model initially was B2C with the intention of pitching to corporates (B2B) in the later stage. We wanted to cater to direct consumers who wanted to buy homemade measl, so our tagline was: “homemade food that fits your lifestyle”.

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What motivated you to start The Punjab Kitchen?

Our motivation was to cover a missing solution in the market. Considering the gap, we identified, we had little doubts that we would face any difficulty (first error!).

As my wife shared the real passion for the sector, she was in charge of the main operations of the whole business. Instead, I was the marketer and the logistics in charge (which was the backbone of the whole business).

Prior to TPK, I had held numerous positions within the corporate sector either as head of sales, marketing, or business development. But in either consumer or healthcare sectors, I did not ever have anything to do with F&B. I had little clue on what kind of challenges we would be facing there.

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How did you build it?

Once we have decided that we were getting on this new project, I carried out a market research and found that it was completely fragmented between a few big organized players.

Anyway, we went ahead with the idea and created an online menu and got into contact with a few professionals from the F&B sector. One thing that was tricky to carry out was the design of a good packaging. It took me a lot of time to sort with multiple vendors.

We also designed some assets to promote our business, such as flyers, posters, banners and stands.

With the positive feedback on the sample tasting and menu, we were clearly ready to go. You can check our website here, and our marketing efforts on this Zomato article and this Facebook Page.

This whole process took us 3 months of intense preparation. This included the following steps:

Incorporation of the company.

Hiring a creative freelancer for branding.

IT outsourcing for the website.

Photo-shooting of food.

Menu finalization.

Building marketing assets (packaging, brochures, carry bags, posters, banner standees).

Outsourcing delivery and cook. We hired one for each.

Preparing a dress code for the delivery boy.

Negotiation with food platforms such as Zomato and Swiggy . Both websites are discovery platforms which help the customer find and order food from thousands of food shops.

. Both websites are discovery platforms which help the customer find and order food from thousands of food shops. Shortlisting influencer marketing partners for social media.

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The whole process listed above lead us to the launch stage, which was clearly the fun part. The real challenges surfaced only afterward.

The pricing of our food was the biggest puzzle to solve. We were clearly not close to the market benchmark, the current price consumers were paying to get a meal, which was around 1$ (70 RS). Our competitors were selling the meals much lower than we. The only 2 ways we could solve this big problem was by achieving economies of scale, which meant to have thousands of customers so that our costs of producing a meal reduced, or to re-use the packaging of the delivered food. Both of them were not possible options.

After working out a basic profit margin, we decided to price our product at $2.5 (150 RS) the vegetarian meals and $3.5 (200 RS) the non-vegetarian meals.