If you are working in a large office complex, you would have been irked by the long wait at the cafeteria when you go there either for a meal or that mid-afternoon snack. If you are part of the company administration, you would be worried about the time your staff spend away from their work stations in the cafeteria. And, if you are the food vendor, you will be concerned about irritated customers and the pilferage that happens, over which you have no control.

This is exactly what HungerBox, a B2B food-tech start-up founded by Sandipan Mitra, seeks to solve by digitising the entire cafeteria experience. It brings together the food vendor, the company and its employees on a single platform to remove all the irritants that result in a bad eating experience in a cafeteria. Sandipan says the pain-point for each of the stakeholders in a cafeteria is different.

For the company, it does not know what is happening in the cafeteria. It is not able to measure the outcome, the service provider’s efficiency and it also wants a cafeteria that is compliant with all regulations. For the employee, who uses the cafeteria regularly, the biggest irritant is the long wait for the food to be delivered. There is utter confusion as the food is randomly delivered. Moreover, the employees have apps for all their other functions, but they do not have one for ordering food in the cafeteria or paying for it.

 

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According to Sandipan, the food vendor has no control over what is happening the cafeteria. He is actually sitting somewhere else, trying to control five or six cafeterias in different office complexes. There is no account of how much food is served and how much money is collected. “All transactions are happening by cash and 18-22 per cent of the sales never get recorded. That is the industry standard. We have had cases where 50 per cent of the sales is not recorded. Pilferage is the biggest problem in the industry,” says Sandipan. The person at the counter becomes the bottleneck because he or she has to take the order, collect the cash and deliver the food. HungerBox designed a digital cafeteria, where it has eliminated all these pain-points, says Sandipan. HungerBox’s first customer was First Source, with whom it launched what is probably the country’s first fully digital cafeteria in September 2016, says Sandipan.

How it works

This is how it works: all employees are given apps, which they can access either on their mobiles or computers, view the list of service providers, scan through their menus, order the food, mention the time of pick-up and pay for it. All of that is happening outside the cafeteria, thus reducing the waiting time.

The food vendor knows when the food has to be got ready and the employee can go to the counter at the specified time, authenticate his or her order using a QR code, pick up the food and leave. HungerBox’s clients include companies such as GE Digital, Qualcomm, Cognizant, Capgemini, Wipro, TCS, IBM and HCL.

Growing orders

“As of today, we manage over 200 cafeterias in 10 cities in the country, serving 2.40 lakh orders a day,” says Sandipan. In 2016, it handled 6,000 orders a day, which went up to 90,000 in 2017. “We will end this year doing 3.5 lakh orders a day,” adds Sandipan.

HungerBox has a 660-member team, most of them in operations at the cafeterias. It has consciously targeted the IT and the knowledge economy sectors because they have a large number of employees and the cafeterias have different vendors. For example, an HCL cafeteria has 44 vendors and 3,900 seats.

“We identified companies with over 100,000 employees, knowledge economy companies and went after them,” says Sandipan. It also curates the food vendor for the cafeterias. It has started targeting the manufacturing sector with three clients now, which number will grow. The company, according to Sandipan, will grow in India, including in tier-2 cities and has requests from its multinational clients to offer the service for its offices in the Asia-Pacific region. It gets its revenue from a commission from the vendors, 10 per cent of the food sale, as they are the biggest beneficiaries of the platform.

For HungerBox, the challenge, says Sandipan, is in managing the transformation of how people order and eat at the cafeterias. Aren’t there set menus in the cafeterias? That is a common misconception, he says. The set menu or the meal is less than 30 per cent of the food consumed in a cafeteria, he points out. The bulk of it is the mid-afternoon snack with a juice or a cup of coffee or tea or even a health snack, all of which have to be put together and served.

HungerBox has started tying up with restaurants outside campuses so that employees working late can order food and have it delivered in their offices. The company will look to raise $5-10 million this year, the amount depending on how aggressively it grows and its global expansion plans.

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