The Types of Tiffin Service Providers
There are so many tiffin service providers out there and ALL of them claim to provide home cooked food or "home like food" or "home style food". While some most certainly do - there are many types of tiffin services that exist in the market. Knowing what's out there and the attributes of each type would enable you to understand what fits your needs and pick accordingly. We attempt to breakdown these various types below so as to help you make a more informed decision.
Home Kitchens aka Home Chefs
This is usually what people have in mind when they think of a tiffin service. Home Kitchens, or as we at dubbz like to call them: Home Chefs, are characterized by an aunty (99% of the times it is a female doing the cooking based on our experience), cooking out of her home kitchen. Usually, it's the same food that she cooks for her family. They cook food in small batches: approx. 5-15 meals per service. They might stretch it to 20-25 meals if they have a custom party/catering order but that's also pushing it. They run the show by themselves or sometimes have help from a family member (husband, daughter, daughter-in-law, sister, local friend) or sometimes they have paid help. They do all the menu design, prep, cooking, cleaning. You could say they're a 1-woman army.
They key advantages of Home Chefs is that since the food is being cooked at home and in small batches: it will mostly be low in oil & spices - not heavy on the stomach. The food will be prepared fresh that day since they don't have the capacity to cook & store gravies/curries in their refrigerators for long periods of time. They will try their best to handle customization requests you may have since it is a small scale operation (but might make mistakes too). Since the scale of the operation is very small - maintaining quality and hygiene is relatively easier and can be trusted more easily. And finally, it feels good that you are supporting a woman micro entrepreneur.
The key disadvantages with Home Chefs can be reliability: since it is a 1 person operation, if that 1 person falls sick/has to go for a wedding/is away on vacation/has to take care of their sick child - the operation comes to a complete halt and you don't get meals anymore.
Commercial Home Kitchen
This is the next step in the journey when a Home Kitchen/Home Chef decides they want to grow/scale their business. They usually get a dedicated space: this could a single room kitchen (1RK) house or they might convert part of their house into a big kitchen area or they might get a small shop/commercial space. They usually hire full time staff to help around the kitchen. And they get far bigger cooking utensils so they can handle cooking the larger volumes of food as compared to when they were at home.
Tiffin services which operate from commercial home kitchens usually prepare between 50-200 meals per service. The cooking is usually now done by the staff with the owner overseeing them. The food does tend to become oilier/heavier (we haven't figured out the root cause for this shift in preparation style - but it almost always happens). The taste changes since it's now being prepared at scale and is now being cooked by a different set of people.
The key advantages of commercial home kitchens are that they are usually the ones who can provide super affordable food. Since they now have the space to cook large volumes of food, they actually have economies of scale when purchasing raw materials and hence can choose to use the low margin/high volume strategy - which a lot of folks in this category do. The food is somewhere between home cooked and restaurant/dhaba style - so if it suits you - then it's definitely a greta affordable option.
The key disadvantage is that due to the food being prepared at scale: it's no longer the thing a lot of people want: home cooked food fit for daily consumption. Another thing to look out for is quality and hygiene. Maintaining quality gets exponentially harder as the number of meals being cooked increases and hence only pick a commercial home kitchen once you have seen verified reviews or has come via a trusted reference.
Commercial Cloud Kitchen
From an attributes perspective - commercial cloud kitchens are very similar to commercial home kitchens. The key differences are: cloud kitchens are usually located in the non-prime parts of town - so they can save on real-estate costs and they are commercial spaces so come with additional compliance overhead.
Advantages and disadvantages here are similar to commercial home kitchens. One could argue that since an individual has taken on the effort and capital to put together a commercial cloud kitchen - they can be considered more trustworthy - but in our experience this should be not be treated as a truism and one should still rely on verified reviews or a trusted reference when choosing such a tiffin service provider.
Commercial Cloud Kitchen Chains
These are the cloud kitchens which have scaled their brand across multiple kitchen which span across geographies. This is usually multiple kitchens within the same city - so they can service more parts of the city but in some rare cases: this is also scaling to other cities/states. These chains are rare.
From an advantages/disadvantages perspective - it's again very similar to cloud kitchens. The fact that they have scaled across locations could signal they have stronger internal controls on their quality/hygiene standards - but again going via verified reviews or a trusted reference would be the way to go.
dubbz
dubbz was primarily 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:
