Urbania’s home-chef revolution
Passionate homemakers transform their township into a food paradise
Urbania has a thriving home-chef community with seven WhatsApp groups to accommodate members beyond the old WhatsApp group member limit of 256 and the new limit of 512.
In the home-chef groups, the thirty-odd chefs offer only home-cooked food from within Urbania. The chefs are free to join any group, whereas the users who order can be in any group. There is no age or gender bar on being a home chef.
If there is one stand-out feature about Urbania’s home chefs, they are highly supportive of each other.
Our friend Shilpi Singhal, a former home chef, had recommended Neena Deshpande as the person who could help me understand this community at Urbania.
I also contacted Vaishali Dalal Oka, who runs Vindys home chef baked food venture, to understand the concept and its features. However, as she is now not so active home chef, she recommended that I contact her friend Neena Deshpande.
Neena is one of Urbania’s leading home chefs who manage Khanyasathi Janma Apula (KJA) in Marathi, loosely translating to Born To Eat in English. Neena is a full-time employee at an MNC and dabbles in KJA out of her passion for cooking, food styling, and blogging.
Neena told me the home chef is Urbania’s platform for anyone who uses a home kitchen to make food for others.
She added it is a talent discovery platform as we find out that residents appreciate the food someone regularly makes at their Urbania home.
Thus, Urbania’s home chefs are all resident women who prepare food in their home kitchen for sale to township residents.
Though there is no data on home-chef group members, it is more than a thousand across Urbania’s Atelier, Acura, Aurelia, and Azziano buildings.
Chefs promote their dishes through posts on the home-chef group, which members order. Some of them are popular outside Urbania and have social media accounts on Instagram and Facebook to promote their brands.
The home-chef groups have some posting rules for the chefs. For example, one chef can only post once a day. And a chef can post only ten minutes after another chef’s post. Such equal opportunities have helped create harmonious and thriving Urbania home-chef groups.
Popular chefs and their dishes get direct orders as Urbanians know well about them or would take references from community neighbors.
Urbania home-chefs function mostly through pre-orders and orders a day in advance. However, some home chefs also accept spot orders at short notice. Pre-ordered food delivery is at a specific time.
The delivery mode is flexible, with either the chef delivering or the person ordering and collecting the food. Home-chef family members sometimes do the food delivery. Payments are digital through G-Pay, UPI, and PayTM.
Home-chef cuisine is diverse and includes vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes from Maharashtra, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab. In addition, some home chefs cater to Italian and Indo-Chinese cuisine.
Urbania’s large Bengali community and others support the resident Bengali sweet makers. Baked products are also among the popular items Urbania home-chef customers order.
The home-chef menu ranges from regular meals to customized, specialty, and party food. Some home chefs also offer dry snacks, seasonal fruits, and festive offers.
As taste and other food preferences are highly subjective, it is not simple or easy to summarise Urbania’s home-chef food quality. However, it is fresher as it gets delivered within the community. Furthermore, the popularity of several home chefs and the high demand for their menu items show they make excellent food.
Also, as most home chefs specialize in one region or food type, several popular home chefs across Urbania exist.
Home chefs are very supportive of each other. They promoted their peers and helped me write this article. Neena Deshpande effusively praised and recommended several other home chefs giving me their contact details and mentioning their food specialties.
Researching this article, I learned that many thriving Thane communities host home-chef groups.
When co-founders Yan Koum and Brian Acton created their wildly successful WhatsApp messaging app, they would certainly not have thought that Indian building communities like those at Urbania would use it for food ordering, deliveries, and payments.
Urbania home-chef groups successfully use WhatsApp for their peer-to-peer (P2P) food ordering e-commerce venture.
Relying on WhatsApp, their culinary skills, resident patronage, and mostly word of mouth and social media publicity, Urbania’s home chefs have created a thriving business model.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I heard the touching story of a neighbor who tested +ve for that infection. He then got a home chef to deliver him hot home-cooked food suitable for a COVID-19 patient.
Each day the home chef would home deliver a hot homely meal to this Urbania resident, who definitely felt better and recovered faster with the help of a home chef, apart from rest medication and medical advice.
I had one experience ordering home-chef food for the Urbania Gardening Group’s third birthday celebrations in March 2022. Shilpi Singhal recommended Karishma Vasudev’s Bakery Kitchen Confectionery (BKC) for the event cake.
I went through BKC’s catalog on Karishma’s WhatsApp business account and ordered a banana walnut cake. On our celebration day, she sent us the delicious cake much appreciated later by the Urbania Gardening Group members.
BKC has an extensive menu like any bakery, allows customization, and is very popular across Urbania.
Neena of KJA is another popular Urbania home chef. She has so far catered to more than 530 orders from her kitchen since 2019. She specializes in party orders, snack boxes, cakes, and customized meals.
Recently, during the Ganesh Chathurthi, she delivered 1015 Ukadiche Modak (a Maharashtrian sweet delicacy of rice and sweet stuffing) across Urbania in 7 days touching 375 modaks on the first day and a hundred plus modaks on three other days. She was also a judge at one of Urbania’s buildings’ modak competitions, encouraging other talented and budding chefs.
If you wonder why I used the word revolution in my title, here it is. On a Urbania resident bus picnic in February 2019 to the Chikoo festival, our organizing team of Shilpi Singhal and Sneha Iyer arranged an onboard breakfast.
They had ordered soft fluffy idlis catered by an Azziano resident lady. We enjoyed the idlis and chutney in aluminum foil trays on our bus journey to Gholvad. Those days the home-chef concept was still in its infancy, and our order was by Shilpi and Sneha’s contact, not on a home-chef group.
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic gave a big fillip to Urbania’s home-chefs increasing demand due to them being the only choice of fresh food when Thane restaurants were not open.
Urbania’s enterprising home chefs, now in 2022, cater to thousands of orders daily and are a defining township feature. They surely contribute to making Rustomjee Urbania a great community to life and Thane’s finest for a wide choice of home dining options.
Urbania home-chef catering is a low carbon footprint activity with delivery on foot. When you don’t order from food tech apps, you prevent traffic congestion from delivery vehicles on Thane roads.
I thank home-chefs Shilpi Singhal, Neena Deshpande, Vaishali Dalal, Sharmishtha Mulye, and Karishma Vasudev for helping me with this article’s content. Their inputs helped me understand and share Urbania’s home chefs with Times of Urbania readers.