Now Reading: Koli home chefs scale up with cloud kitchens and big catering
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Koli home chefs scale up with cloud kitchens and big catering
Mumbai's Koli home chefs are moving from seasonal seafood plazas to cloud kitchens and large-scale catering. The Daryavardi Producer Company Limited, a women-led fish producer organisation, opened its first cloud kitchen in…
The Story in Brief
Mumbai's Koli home chefs are moving from seasonal seafood plazas to cloud kitchens and large-scale catering. The Daryavardi Producer Company Limited, a women-led fish producer organisation, opened its first cloud kitchen in Mahim Koliwada last week. It follows a 40 kg catering order in June for a birthday party at a senior citizens' resort in Wai, Satara, where 12 chefs cooked for 150 guests.
The women are also undergoing formal training in product development and event management. At Google's BKC office, 30 Koli women completed a two-day crash course in budgeting and pitching last month. Independent Koli chefs are building parallel businesses, and the cooks say each large event teaches them how to improve, from customising fish slice thickness to preparing sol kadhi closer to service time.
The Indian Opinion
The coverage risks reading as a feel-good tale of women entrepreneurs effortlessly scaling up. But the real lesson lies in the numbers and the hard work legwork: learning to price ingredients, transport and labour before setting a price, as a failed Rs 150 thali at a Pune college festival showed. The test of this growth will come in the costs of running the Mahim kitchen and whether the women can sustain demand beyond festive seasons, when the phone stops ringing with referrals.
Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com
This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
