)
Mumbai: Calorie Care
Launched in 2007, Calorie Care in Mumbai is one of the oldest players in the healthy food delivery space, and currently delivers over 1,000 meals a day. “Finding a healthy meal is not easy. And if it is healthy, it isn’t tasty. Our philosophy is to deliver meals that are both healthy and tasty,” says Sujay Naik, director of Calorie Care. The service offers breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, and includes low, medium and high calorie meals, as well those with low sodium, sugar or both. Nutritionists also offer individual diet plans, depending on your requirement.
Meals are available six days a week, and chefs pick from a database of over 2,000 recipes designed in consultation with a nutritionist and diet counsellor. “The variety we offer helps keep boredom at bay,” says Naik. A vegetarian, international cuisine lunch of medium proportion last Friday would have got you a mushroom soup a salad Nicoise, sauteed vegetables and spaghetti with vegetarian bolognaise. Every meal comes with a printed leaflet with all the nutritional information.
Meals are prepared in a centralised kitchen and delivered by the company’s team. While marketing has largely been through word-of-mouth, Calorie Care also gets a lot of interest from corporate clients.
Pricing: Starts from Rs 105 to Rs 300 a day, and you need to order for a minimum of 10 days.
Order from: www.caloriecare.com
Delhi: Tarani’s Low Calorie Kitchen
The question of how a passionate foodie could eat well and also lose weight is what pushed Tarani Kapur to launch her calorie-controlled gourmet food delivery venture. A little over a year old, Tarani’s Low Calorie (TLC) Kitchen delivers heat-and-eat, set portion meals with a fixed amount of calories, so that you don’t have to do the counting. “We have an in-house nutritionist and I’ve just hired a chef from The Oberoi, but the food itself has always been my baby,” she says. Unlike others in the space, TLC Kitchen positions itself as a gourmet food delivery service, with dishes such as sea bass cobbler, apple crumble tart and roasted chilli Asian fish. Kapur says she has a two-week menu cycle, during which dishes are not repeated and cuisines include Indian, Italian, Lebanese and Oriental.
Customers can choose from four meal plans, depending on what their requirements are: weight management, healthy heart, calorie control and diabetic-friendly. Within these, you can choose from lunch, dinner or both, for a minimum of two weeks. The meals are flash frozen as soon as they are prepared, packed and delivered to your home twice a week. Customers just have to heat and eat. Though currently only available in the National Capital Region, couriering them to Mumbai, Jaipur, Hyderabad and Punjab is being considered.
Pricing: A two-week weight management plan with lunch and dinner costs Rs 7,000
Order from: indiareputation.com/development/rk/tlc/
“Nutrition is our first priority,” Tapan Kumar Das, co-founder of iTiffin, says firmly, explaining why the company only accepts orders for at least a week. “If we take orders for only one meal, we would be misguiding you. This is not about entertainment,” he says, explaining iTiffin offers only a subscription model.
Born out of cricketer Robin Uthappa’s request for a meal plan, iTiffin now considers itself the premier healthy food delivery startup in Bengaluru. From 100 meals a day in September 2013, it now delivers over 2,000 meals a day, prepared by an in-house team of chefs at a centralised kitchen, and guided by a team of nutritionists.
A 550 k/cal non-vegetarian lunch box would typically have a portion of brown rice, three chappatis, a vegetable dish, a non-vegetarian dish and a salad. There are also continental options, and for institutional clients like offices and schools, menus are customised. The startup’s database has over a thousand recipes. “We do not repeat dishes for three months,” says Das. iTiffin also offers a munch box with healthy snacks, which is couriered to cities apart from Bengaluru. When launched, customers would complain that the box was too small, but when they tried it out, they realised it was sufficient, says Das. “Even Robin cannot eat more than one box!” he adds. Uthappa is also an investor in the company.
Pricing: Rs 675 for a 550 k/Cal lunch box every day for a week
Order from: www.itiffin.in
Bengaluru: SpoonJoy
With the promise of “daily food at your office desk”, six-month-old startup SpoonJoy has managed to attract funding from the likes of Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal. Founder Manish Jethani says he wanted to provide an alternative to home-cooked food. “These days, people do not have the time or effort to cook every day, so they either end up making quick food like instant noodles or order from restaurants, neither of which is healthy,” he says. Simultaneously, he realised that there was a lack of healthy eating options you could use every day, which was both light and affordable.
Jethani says Spoonjoy does not believe in counting calories, as it puts too much pressure on oneself. Instead, it tries to provide healthy food by better alternatives, such as using a curd-based spread in a sandwich instead of mayonnaise. At present, the company offers only lunch but will soon be adding dinner. A consultant nutritionist and a team of chefs innovate with recipes and have come up with 125 unique dishes. On any given day, customers can choose from seven or eight options. Options include kadhi and rice, different salads and even a “lighter take” on the chicken biriyani that promises not to make you feel drowsy.
Pricing: Rs 70-80 per meal
Order from: www.spoonjoy.com
