Delight Foods brings delicacies from all corners of India to your doorstep

If you crave for a particular snack from a specific vendor in your neighborhood, you can pay a visit and buy it. What if that particular snack is only available in a shop that’s thousands of miles away from you – in a different city altogether? In that case, you would have to wait for the opportunity to visit that city to fulfil your craving. This could take months, years, or eternity. How about fulfilling your craving in just two days?

Bangalore-based food portal Delight Foods allows users to buy famous Indian food brands from across the country. Users can choose a variety of delicacies and place their orders. Delight Foods has packing centers in all its operating cities. Once an order is placed, it picks up the food item from the merchant, packs, and ships it to the destination city. Upon arrival, it gets repacked into a consumer delivery box and is then shipped to the customer’s home.

Food from all over India

Bangalore-based Delight Food was founded last month by Ramesh Krishnamurthy. He is an IIT/IIM alumnus with 25 years of retail, sales, and marketing experience in firms like Unilever and Nokia. He was also the chief commercial officer of Mumbai International Airport and GMR Hyderabad International Airport.

“I have spent my formative years in Unilever’s food business and always found it very exciting. Over the last 25 years, I have travelled to many Indian cities on business trips – it was always fascinating to discover great food in each city,” says Krishnamurthy on why he entered the food ecommerce business. Bringing this startup to life is co-founder HS Srinivasan, who is a logistics professional with experience in Nokia, Reddington, and a couple of ecommerce companies.

“These are very exciting times in the ecommerce business. I wanted to leverage my execution experience to set up this business; and of course entrepreneurship is always so much more exciting and fun,” adds Krishnamurthy.

Consumers can choose from different categories of food items – sweets, savouries, masalas (spices) and DIY cooking mixes, papads (thin wafers) and pickles, as well as biscuits. Delight Foods covers over 60 foods brands from across 11 different Indian cities – Hand Murukku (a South Indian crispy snack) from The Grand Sweets in Chennai, Andhra Sweets Combo from G Pulla Reddy in Hyderabad, and Fruit Kaju (cashew) biscuits from Frontier Biscuits in Delhi.

India is a country of many festivals, and gift-giving is a major cultural norm during all these events. The founders believe Delight Foods can be used for that purpose.

The minimum order amount is INR 250 (US$4) and INR 99 (nearly US$2) is charged for shipping. However, the company offers free deliveries for all orders above INR 1,000 (US$15.70). It takes a minimum of two days for Delight Foods to deliver an order via air-freight, but expect to wait four days if the delivery location is remote or if there are logistical issues. Therefore, it only deals with food items which have a shelf life of more than seven days. It also keeps a margin on each of its products to earn its revenue.

Being an operations and logistics-heavy venture, the company test-operated each of its processes and packaging systems carefully for two months before launch to ensure quality delivery.

Last week, Delight Foods raised about US$150,000 in a pre-launch funding round led by MAPE Advisory Group and Fireside Ventures. The money will be used for hiring and marketing. It plans to add more product categories and expand its operations to 10 cities in the next few months – it currently delivers only in Bangalore. It also plans to raise more funds to expand more aggressively.

In India, Delight Foods competes with food portals like CitynU, Food Feasta, Mithali4all, Pakumania, and Mithaiwala.