 "<b>TravelKhana:</b> Now, book your travel meals online")
For Prashant Jain, a frequent traveller on the Amritsar-Mumbai CST Express, food has always been a concern. After compromising with the bad quality, limited choice and insipid food offered by various hawkers, Jain tried TravelKhana.com on the advice of a friend. The experience has made Jain a regular customer of TravelKhana. Now, whenever he travels, he gets tasty, quality food delivered at his seat.
The journey
TravelKhana.com is a meal-booking platform connecting train travellers with restaurants along Indian Railways' network. It promises to bring anything from traditional Indian thalis to assorted choices in Chinese, continental, local and Mughlai from popular restaurants to railway passengers.
Founded in January 2012 in Delhi by Pushpinder Singh, an IT-BHU and BITS-Pilani alumnus, with 15 years' experience in the software sector, TravelKhana tracks trains in real-time and ensures fresh food is delivered to the passenger according to his/her choice at the station.
"As an avid traveller, I knew there was an urgent need to solve some of the problems faced by travellers. I found 20 websites to buy tickets for travelling in rail, bus or air but no help around when on the move," recalls Singh, the co-founder and chief executive officer.
"Being a techie, I set out to make a marketplace for a person on the move, using technology and wanted to include food, transport, lodging, information and social media, till I realised the problem would be huge. Initially, I decided to focus on the food-on-the-move issue and conceptualised TravelKhana," he adds.
How does it work? A train traveller can book food by visiting its website or downloading the app from Play Store and giving the name of the train, coach & seat number, departure & arrival stations, and date of travel. The traveller can choose food from the menus of a list of restaurants along the route make payment online and sit back, waiting for the food to be delivered.
The opportunity
In a country where around 15 million people travel by train every day, the meals-on-wheels market opportunity is estimated at $2 billion. Now crowded with players, including YatraChef, MeraFoodChoice, Train Khana Comesum and Railtiffin.com, TravelKhana sees itself doing food delivery on all types of travel - rail, bus, air and highways - and with extensive coverage across smaller cities and stations.
"We are currently working on developing a virtual QSR (quick service restaurant) model, with strong processes for restaurants on our marketplace. The model could be scaled to buses and highways, and could eventually be applicable to in-the-city marketplace as well," says Singh.
TravelKhana recently raised $2 million (Rs 13 crore) in a bridge round, led by Mumbai-based seed fund Astarc Ventures, which it planned to deploy to expand to 400 railways stations from the current 150 by the end of 2016.
"The deep pain point the company is solving - good food in trains, otherwise not available, is one factor we took into consideration while investing in TravelKhana. The second factor is the validation of the problem. TravelKhana has shown this model works by executing it over the past year; it has good traction," says Salil Musale, executive director, Astarc.
He says Astarc Ventures is actively taking part on strategy level and helping TravelKhana focus on key areas, beside giving inputs on hiring, operations and business development.
Singh says TravelKhana would raise its Series-A ($10 million) funding in the next six months. Already available on the Android and Windows platforms, TravelKhana is gearing up to roll out its iOS version in the next two weeks, he adds.
Way forward
With a strong vendor base of around 1,500, TravelKhana has delivered food to 1.1 million customers since inception, including to large groups from Thomas Cook, Cox and Kings, and Bharti Axa. "We should be delivering 120,000 meals a day in the next three years," says Singh.
TravelKhana generated revenue of Rs 6.54 crore in 2014-15 and expects this to increase threefold this year and fivefold in the next. "At the current scale, we expect to break even after 24 months," Singh notes.
EXPERT TAKE: Raju Bhupathi
TravelKhana is one of the early entrants into food chains that deliver on trains. It seems to have garnered a niche market, and is a great distributor that offers immense choice to the consumer.
The business model is built on local franchises it establishes at each location. While this enables easy scale, sustainability and delivery on the ground, such a decentralised operations model has to stand scrutiny over time on execution success.
Predictable service, speed of operations, quality of food and a reliable delivery supply chain are critical components.
This is a novel concept. The model is dependent on local partnerships or national franchises that can enable scale of operations. This entails inherent dependencies within the model, such as local kitchen and delivery staff, decentralised metrics for monitoring success and differentiated accounting paradigms such as dynamic pricing models. Risks inherited are standardised food-making processes, quality assurance of the product, uniformity of service and reliability of supply and delivery chains.
Predictable, measurable and scalable operations always require real-time analytics to assess weak links of operations and implement solutions to address ongoing risks.
Operational training to ensure uniformity of food quality, delivery services, supply chain reliability are also imperative. Some percentage of failure is a reality that can mar reputation, which is key to making inroads into consumer satisfaction. Hence, a rigorous centralised system of daily checks and balances is a requisite.
Food chains can scale only through national franchises. An obsessive attention to inorganic acquisitions, horizontal integration, branding, quality of product and relentless innovation are my own parameters for ensuring growth.
Nurture continuously the two most important values in this business - brand and reputation. These two ingredients are crucial to establish credibility.
| FACT BOX |
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The journey
TravelKhana.com is a meal-booking platform connecting train travellers with restaurants along Indian Railways' network. It promises to bring anything from traditional Indian thalis to assorted choices in Chinese, continental, local and Mughlai from popular restaurants to railway passengers.
Founded in January 2012 in Delhi by Pushpinder Singh, an IT-BHU and BITS-Pilani alumnus, with 15 years' experience in the software sector, TravelKhana tracks trains in real-time and ensures fresh food is delivered to the passenger according to his/her choice at the station.
"As an avid traveller, I knew there was an urgent need to solve some of the problems faced by travellers. I found 20 websites to buy tickets for travelling in rail, bus or air but no help around when on the move," recalls Singh, the co-founder and chief executive officer.
"Being a techie, I set out to make a marketplace for a person on the move, using technology and wanted to include food, transport, lodging, information and social media, till I realised the problem would be huge. Initially, I decided to focus on the food-on-the-move issue and conceptualised TravelKhana," he adds.
How does it work? A train traveller can book food by visiting its website or downloading the app from Play Store and giving the name of the train, coach & seat number, departure & arrival stations, and date of travel. The traveller can choose food from the menus of a list of restaurants along the route make payment online and sit back, waiting for the food to be delivered.
The opportunity
In a country where around 15 million people travel by train every day, the meals-on-wheels market opportunity is estimated at $2 billion. Now crowded with players, including YatraChef, MeraFoodChoice, Train Khana Comesum and Railtiffin.com, TravelKhana sees itself doing food delivery on all types of travel - rail, bus, air and highways - and with extensive coverage across smaller cities and stations.
"We are currently working on developing a virtual QSR (quick service restaurant) model, with strong processes for restaurants on our marketplace. The model could be scaled to buses and highways, and could eventually be applicable to in-the-city marketplace as well," says Singh.
TravelKhana recently raised $2 million (Rs 13 crore) in a bridge round, led by Mumbai-based seed fund Astarc Ventures, which it planned to deploy to expand to 400 railways stations from the current 150 by the end of 2016.
"The deep pain point the company is solving - good food in trains, otherwise not available, is one factor we took into consideration while investing in TravelKhana. The second factor is the validation of the problem. TravelKhana has shown this model works by executing it over the past year; it has good traction," says Salil Musale, executive director, Astarc.
He says Astarc Ventures is actively taking part on strategy level and helping TravelKhana focus on key areas, beside giving inputs on hiring, operations and business development.
Singh says TravelKhana would raise its Series-A ($10 million) funding in the next six months. Already available on the Android and Windows platforms, TravelKhana is gearing up to roll out its iOS version in the next two weeks, he adds.
Way forward
With a strong vendor base of around 1,500, TravelKhana has delivered food to 1.1 million customers since inception, including to large groups from Thomas Cook, Cox and Kings, and Bharti Axa. "We should be delivering 120,000 meals a day in the next three years," says Singh.
TravelKhana generated revenue of Rs 6.54 crore in 2014-15 and expects this to increase threefold this year and fivefold in the next. "At the current scale, we expect to break even after 24 months," Singh notes.
EXPERT TAKE: Raju Bhupathi
TravelKhana is one of the early entrants into food chains that deliver on trains. It seems to have garnered a niche market, and is a great distributor that offers immense choice to the consumer.
The business model is built on local franchises it establishes at each location. While this enables easy scale, sustainability and delivery on the ground, such a decentralised operations model has to stand scrutiny over time on execution success.
Predictable service, speed of operations, quality of food and a reliable delivery supply chain are critical components.
This is a novel concept. The model is dependent on local partnerships or national franchises that can enable scale of operations. This entails inherent dependencies within the model, such as local kitchen and delivery staff, decentralised metrics for monitoring success and differentiated accounting paradigms such as dynamic pricing models. Risks inherited are standardised food-making processes, quality assurance of the product, uniformity of service and reliability of supply and delivery chains.
Predictable, measurable and scalable operations always require real-time analytics to assess weak links of operations and implement solutions to address ongoing risks.
Operational training to ensure uniformity of food quality, delivery services, supply chain reliability are also imperative. Some percentage of failure is a reality that can mar reputation, which is key to making inroads into consumer satisfaction. Hence, a rigorous centralised system of daily checks and balances is a requisite.
Food chains can scale only through national franchises. An obsessive attention to inorganic acquisitions, horizontal integration, branding, quality of product and relentless innovation are my own parameters for ensuring growth.
Nurture continuously the two most important values in this business - brand and reputation. These two ingredients are crucial to establish credibility.
(Raju Bhupathi is the chief executive officer of a Hyderabad-based fast Indian food chain start-up, Hello Curry)