HIMANSHU RASAM
Product Manager
Stores 2 Stomach:
Food delivery service
Summary:
IIT Bhubaneswar campus had 3 hostels for students placed at 3 different locations. The main hostel where I used to live is in the centre of the city of Bhubaneswar (location C)while the 2 other hostels were located at locations far off from the city (locations D and I).
They were so far from the city that commercial food chains like SUBWAY , DOMINOS, KFC did not provide a home delivery to these places. Thus the students had to come all the way down to the city to eat a decent pizza or a sandwich. Hence, me along with a couple of my friends (Dhananjay Deshmukh and Abhinav Krishnan) decided to start a food delivery service from such food chains to the distant hostels utilizing the college bus service.
Market Research
A total of 400 students stayed at the hostel location D(Kesura, Jharpada district) and around 200 students at the hostel location I(Madanpur). We estimated that if such service is provided at least 30 students from location D and 20 students from location I would place orders every day. After calculating the initial investment, breakeven analysis and scope of profit, we proceeded with a 3 day field testing or beta testing for the hostel at location C. We had managed to obtain some great deals and discount offers from SUBWAY and DOMINOS while KFC was still at the negotiation phase. We monitored our sales and profits at the hostel in the city(location C) and got a rough estimate how to proceed with the service.
The operations were broken down to 4 tasks as follows
1. Sponsorship and cutting deals with the food chains / restaurants. Creating a MoU.
2. Collecting the food orders from the suppliers at the given location, sorting them and loading them into college buses .
3. Delivering the orders to hostels at location D and I to the customers.
All the operations were done using google spreadsheets and documented for record. We split the above mentioned operations amonst ourselves and used to change duties once in a while. The startup ran successfully throughout our senior year of the college. This was my first succesful venture. I worked on several aspects of the venture including service design, customer experience, marketting and supply chain management.
