India’s urbanites are getting busier. This startup wants to help them be a home masterchef

I have been living alone in Delhi for the past 10 years now. In this time, I’ve realized one thing – I don’t like cooking. It’s not the act of cooking itself that I dislike, but the prepping associated with it; the dicing, chopping, slicing, and getting all the ingredients in order. I am way too lazy for that. I don’t mind showing off my cooking prowess if someone helps me out with getting the ingredients ready. I am sure there are many single men out there who feel the same way. This Indian food startup called Being Chef claims to address this pain area.

Being Chef says it can turn any layman into a good cook by offering them processed ingredients of a dish, in the right amount, along with the recipe. Once a customer orders a recipe kit of a particular dish, it provides him or her with a box (called the magic box) of ingredients (oil, garnish, the lot), chopped and processed in the required quantity, and customized as per the customer’s taste. The recipe card provides the instruction to prepare the dish. The customer can cook the dish in a matter of minutes by simply following the instructions.

“The recipes are designed by our chief food officer Aditi Madan – a top contender on MasterChef India season 3,” says Shubham Maheshwari, founder and CEO of Being Chef. “The ingredients are free of preservatives and the packaging material of the ‘magic box’ ensures freshness of the ingredients and has a shelf life of six hours.”

If someone prefers, they could opt instead for fully-cooked meals, customizable meal boxes, or even catering services.

Home cooking

After graduating from National Institute of Technology Jaipur, Rajasthan, in 2013, Maheshwari joined a sales and marketing consultancy in Gurgaon. This was the first time he had to move out of his hometown, Jaipur. On moving to Gurgaon, he started facing the dreaded problem every single person living alone in a city, away from his or her family faces – relying on food delivery restaurants and hired cooks for food. He missed the home-cooked food his mother makes and was dissatisfied with his cook’s dishes. All these woes somehow helped him conceive the concept of Being Chef.

“After the inception of this idea, I worked on it for eight months, did some market research, shaped and structured it. When the working plan was ready, I left my job in February 2014 and started working full-time on my venture,” he says.

Being Chef also targets professionals who reach home late after a long day’s work and don’t want to spend hours in their kitchens creating a mess with all the planning and prepping. With the ingredients processed and ready, they can enjoy the cooking process, which also acts as a stress buster.

The startup is currently in bootstrap mode, but plans to raise some funds in near future.

Being Chef currently operates only in Gurgaon but is working on expanding to other cities in India, as well as abroad.

Food fight

Internationally, Being Chef faces competition from major meal subscription services such as Blue Apron, HelloFresh, Plated, and Home Chef. There’s even one, Saffron Fix, that focuses on Indian cuisines.

Back home, Being Chef faces competition from food ingredient delivery services like Cookfresh, iChef, Chef’s Basket, ChefKraft, and Haute Chef.