How to Pick a Tiffin Service
Finding the right solution for your daily meals can be a challenging and at times frustrating process.
You might be new to the city. You just found a house (after a lot of house hunting!) - and now you're trying to figure out how will you get your 3 square meals a day. Or, you've been around in the city for a while - but have gotten bored of the existing options you've been eating.
You go online - and you see so many options! But how do you pick? We have here below a simple guide to help you pick the right tiffin service for you.
Home Kitchen v/s Cloud Kitchen
One of the most important aspects to consider is whether you are picking a cloud kitchen or a home kitchen. No good/bad sides here - each has their own set of tradeoffs.
A cloud kitchen will generally produce food at scale, between ~50-500 meals per service (so, ~50-500 meals for lunch service & ~50-500 meals for dinner service). Cooking food at scale would always have an impact on the taste and preparation style of the food. It generally tends be more oily & heavy as what home cooked food is. Maintaing quality and hyginene when you're cooking such large quantities of food is exponentially harder as compared to cooking for a few people - so be sure check reviews for quality & hygiene issues.
A home kitchen would generally cook food - which is more "homely" - less oily, heavy - since they cook in small batches. Certain households do use more oil than you may like since everyone has their own disticntive preparation styles - so be sure to try them out for a few days before making longer commitments. Home kitchens are also almost always more affordable as compared to cloud kitchens - this is primarily becuase of their cost structures (a topic for another day).
Food Preparation Style
Another important aspect is the native food preparation style of the tiffin service. A Maharashtrian provider would cook food accoridng to their native style which they have grown up with - and Mahasrashtrian food is genereally on the spicier side with chapatis which are big and thick.
Contrast that to a Gujarati tiffin service in which the food would be on the sweeter side since their vegetables and dals generally has a little bit of sugar or jaggery in it.
You could request them to customise it according to your taste (example: make it less spciy) - but that practically doesn't always work - since the tiffin service would have other customers which like their food as is - and then customising for a single order can lead to confusion and errors (remember that these are just businesses being run by 1-2 people and don't have sophisticated processes in-place). But if there's anyone that can customise it - it's a home kitchen. Cloud kitchen mass produce the food - and the chances of them being able to customise it to your requirements is low.
Packaging
When you think of a tiffin - you usually recall a multil layered steel container - being carried by a dabbawala. But that isn't the gold standard in packaging when it comes to maintaining sanitization & hygiene. Specially after the pandemic - plastic disposable containers are considered the best alternative for packaging. They are use & throw, avoids issues of maintaining hygiene when cleaning.
Now, this does come with its environmental impact. All these plastic containers would end up in landfills and would not decompose for years - but unfortunately there are no mainstream options when it comes to packaging which is environmentally sustainable + cost effective too.
Flexibility
This is again a very important point - specially if you make a longer term commitment (monthly/quarterly) with a tiffin service. Some of them have onerous terms like: meals you paid for will exprire if you don't use them in 30 days or if you don't want a meal on a certain day - it cannot be carried forward. Top 3 key things to look for in a package/subscription:
- No Expiry of Meals: You should get the meals you paid for. They shouldn't expire just becuase you used them in 35 days rather than 30.
- Ability to Carry Forward Meals: You should be able to carry forward a meal (with suffucient notice) without any penalty
- Ability to Pause Subscriptions: You should be able to pause your subscription in case you are unavailable for a few days - without any penalty.
- Cancellation Terms: You might need to cancel your subscription midway due to unforseen reasons and hence it's good to be clear about the cancellation terms.
Religious Aspects
If you have certain requirements - like you need Jain food or need food which is cooked in a pure veg kitchen kitchen (no meat being cooked in the same kitchen) - be sure to check upfront if they can fulfill these requirements.
Reviews Reviews Reviews
Reviews remain the best way to understand whether a given tiffin service fits your requirements. There is a tendency that reviews tend to skew towards the worse of the experiences - so do take them with a grain of salt - but all in all - they will be helpful in getting a good sense of the kind of tiffin service you are looking at.
dubbz
dubbz was priamrily built to make finding a home cooked meal - which is fit for daily consumption - super super convenient. On dubbz, you can:
- see customer ratings
- the food preparation style
- transparently see prices for meals and discounts you may get on subscriptions
- Can carry forward meals in a subscription at the click of a button - no questions asked
- Can pause subscriptions at the click of a button - no questions asked
- Get reliable and timely delivery - with tracking
If you're looking out for a tiffin service - check out dubbz:
