Online gourmet stores fast becoming popular

Imagine having your favourite meal being delivered at your doorstep with the least possible effort on your part – just a click of a mouse. What a luxury, right? Well that is why the only gourmet market is fast emerging, with myriad virtual stores mushrooming on the web.

“It is fast; it is convenient, and it is cost effective,” explains Aditi Talreja who runs a virtual food store called delivery chef– a one of its kind online portal which allows you to order prepared meals from any restaurant in Mumbai. “We have some 250 vendors on board – both restaurants and independent volunteers. It was a tough task initially – to convince people to join us. But now restaurants approach us,” says Aditi. So how does it work?

Simple, you log onto this site, feed in your location where you want the order to be delivered. You are then provided with the options – of various restaurants/cafes/individuals who deliver in that area. Next, you just need to decide your meal, click, make a payment and wait for the food to arrive!

“There is a 70 year old lady who’s joined us and she makes amazing mithais. She’d never done this professionally before. Besides the popular brands, we also have housewives and young girls working with us,” she adds.

Delicious now is a Delhi based gourmet store run by Adrien De Montalembert who believes that people in India prefer home delivery due to several reasons such as traffic, heat, lack of parking and bad maintenance of shops. “By offering an online platform, people don’t need to face all these inconveniences and can shop directly from their place with the support a website can offer in terms of recipes, videos, and products descriptions,” he says.

While many of us still enjoy our collective routine shopping patterns – of walking into a grocery store, pausing every 10 seconds to pick different items, scan it all over, mull for a bit before finally placing it in the shopping cart or fixing it back in the rack – online gourmet stores do not see these supermarkets as their competition.

These online stores come as a respite to foreign tourists, NRIs or people who cannot understand the local language of the city as it spares them the need for interaction.

The Gourmet Company is another Bombay based online store run by Neerja Mittersain, who feels that people can not only save the trouble of going to the stores, but also avail products and offers which might not be available elsewhere. “It works like flipkart. You order and we deliver. There is a wide range of products in different price ranges,” she adds.