OyeChotu seeks to spice up NRIs' menu, mulls B2B prospects

Ahmedabad-based Rock Foods Pvt Ltd is trying to delight the Indians living abroad with what they miss the most: Indian food. It online venture, oyechotu.com, which was started on a pilot basis as an online food ordering portal, will now also function as a food delivery service for NRIs.

"Our main vision was always becoming a worldwide delivery channel for Indian food items. We started as a food ordering service to see market's reaction and comfort with online ordering and how customers react to online marketing," said Ruchita Desai, founder, Oyechotu.

Founded in February 2012, OyeChotu launched the overseas delivery service in August. OyeChotu delivers food items like pickles, chutneys, ready-to-eat snacks, syrups, Indian sweets, pre-cooking preparation masalas and more. The USP, as Desai puts it, is the quality of food items and the option for customers to ask for food items from a specific shop, which the OyeChotu team will source it from that eatery and ship it. "Currently, we have this facility for Gujarat, Mumbai and are exploring Indore but we are planning to expand base for this service very soon," Desai added.

OyeChotu also delivers domestically and at present out of their total orders about 30 percent comes from within India itself. "Though it's too early to actually gauge the traction we are getting very good response. We get a lot of enquiries from China and Thailand and we receive majority of orders on the weekend," Desai told.

The delivery charges vary from country to country and sometimes depend on the volume of order also. OyeChotu has also done away with the minimum order volume. Though many NRIs would simply love the service, B2C alone is not the true calling of OyeChotu. "We are looking at B2B expansion wherein we can send food items to stores and shops abroad. B2B orders get more revenue and are bigger in volume as well," Desai added.

Just like many other start-ups, OyeChotu was born out of personal experience as well. On one of her trips abroad on work, Desai was unable to get good quality Indian food anywhere, prompting her to start Oyechotu. Indians love their food and would definitely go that extra mile to get their favourite food item. But, would this idea sustain as a business? Watch out this space for more in such novel concepts.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)