Maa Ka Dulaar – Empowering Women!

Maa ka Dulaar is a food-tech startup that satisfies your taste buds and cravings for home-cooked meals prepared with the love of a mother while ensuring your health and hygiene. This startup connects moms in Bangalore, Aligarh (UP) who are in love with cooking. You can order home-cooked food anywhere in Bangalore and UP.

Maa Ka Dulaar is more than a startup that is providing home-cooked food as well as empowering women, this impressed me more :)! Maa Ka Dulaar, as the name suggests, food is cooked by moms. They only work with the Mom-Chefs, who get a platform to display their culinary skills and be independent. These Mom-Chefs are perfect in cooking food in a healthy and hygienic way.

Since its launch, Maa Ka Dulaar says it has over 20+ chefs working currently and 100+ subscribers in Bangalore and UP. The startup looks to make 1k+ subscribers in the next 18-24 months. They have also launched two apps for home chefs and their customers. It also delivers homemade snacks and sweets, corporate Diwali hampers to PAN India which are healthy and made with love by the moms.

The Hans India spoke to Shekhar Mittal, Founder and CEO, Maa ka Dulaar to know a bit more about the startup's journey so far and its future plans.

1. Please share something about yourself? What were you doing before this…

I came from a small city called Aligarh, UP. Like every other student, I too have a dream of pursuing engineering, hence I chose one of the prestigious colleges in Bangalore and started my journey. Engineering college not only gave me subjective teaching but also forced me to think about where my core skills lie. In 2014, I began working with Accenture in Bangalore and later moved to Ladybird Web Solution Private Limited as a Business Development Manager. After that, I worked as an International Business Development Manager for NeoSOFT Technologies until 2020, when I decided to give full time to my own startup.

Every company taught me some or the other skills which actually helped me when I started our Maa Ka Dulaar journey.

Maa ka Dulaar is a food-tech startup that connects all Indian moms in Bangalore, Aligarh(UP) who are in love with cooking. The objective is to satisfy your taste buds and cravings for home-cooked meals prepared with the love of a mother, while also ensuring your health and hygiene. Throughout this covid outbreak, all of us were trapped and afraid to eat outside food. Following suitable safety and security precautions stated by the government, Maa Ka Dulaar stepped up and served meals to frontline heroes, physicians, patients and those who are in need of the service.

2) What inspired you to come up with Maa ka Dulaar?

With a sparkle in his eyes, Shekhar says, "The thought occurred to me while I was a student studying in Bangalore. By default, I had to eat the food served in the campus canteen, which was difficult to consume every other day. Rather than once a month or once a week, I dine outside daily. But, in my mind, the worry about health and cleanliness persisted and disturbed me greatly. I've always imagined that there should be a facility where I could get good quality, hygienic meals like my Maa used to serve me. Hence I decided to give a pivot trial for my idea, and after getting a good response from the customer we decided to start on weekends to kickstart our journey."

3) Why did you choose the name Maa ka Dulaar?

With a big smile, he said, "I always believed in the superiority of food made at home with the love of a mother, as well as the importance of health and hygiene, and so Maa Ka Dulaar was selected. The reason for this is the enormous amount of love that goes into each meal by home moms is unmatchable."

4) What makes Maa ka Dulaar different or special?

"Maa ka Dulaar is more than just a facility to have home-cooked meals. We are also empowering women to stand on their own feet with an exceptional ability to prepare meals. Maa Ka Dulaar, as the name implies, denotes that the dish is prepared by mothers. As a result, we are only working with the Mom-Chefs, and the rationale for this is to provide them with a platform to display their culinary abilities," said Shekhar with a lot of enthusiasm.

5) How does Maa ka Dular work? How do you charge or pay your Chefs?

Maa ka Dulaar provides a platform that connects Indian mothers with the people around them who are in need of food service. In regards to ordering a meal, customers register themselves on the MKD Customer App and login from the same. Once logged in, they can see nearby kitchens and their menu which our chefs are preparing on a daily basis. Customers have options to choose their preferences and can schedule the order as per their convenience.

Once an order is scheduled, our respective kitchen will receive a notification about the order in their MKD Chef App. They have an option of accepting or rejecting the order, once the order is accepted by the kitchen they will start the preparation accordingly. The food is prepared here by women who are excellent at cooking tasty and healthy food and get paid per meal basis.

We have a business tie up with the delivery provider "Dunzo," and it has been integrated with our app. Hence once the order is completed in the kitchen, delivery partners come to the location and take the order and dispatch it to the respective delivery location.

6) Reach of MKD…. Any plans to spread MKD to South India?

Yes definitely, we are getting a lot of requests from other states where home chefs want to join us. Hence we are planning to move ahead in other metropolitan cities soon. Also, we have launched an app for home chefs which will bring other city chefs under one roof.

7) What kind of challenges did you face during your journey?

It wasn't as pleasant as usual. I had to handle all of the deliveries singlehandedly. Things were a little challenging to handle because I was working and managing both my job and Maa ka Dulaar's company operations and deliveries on my own. So overall delivery was the major challenge for us, but lately, we tied up with a lot of third parties like dunzo, porter and it has been sorted up now.

8) Who all supported you to make your dream come true?

Most parents and family members do not support ideas in the early stages of a business because they believe they will fail. However, once they see the progress and that others are recognizing and respecting the work, they will provide full support. So, while they were at first unsupportive, they are now embracing Maa Ka Dulaar as their own endeavour.

9) Which apps are Maa ka Dular compatible with?

Presently we have two apps, one is for customers for ordering on a daily basis.

Maa Ka Dulaar – Apps on Google Play

The other one is for chefs who are managing their daily orders, menu and other relevant setups for their online kitchen

Maa Ka Dulaar -First Choice for Home Chefs! – Apps on Google Play

These apps are compatible with Razorpay for secure online payments and delivery partners like dunzo to get scheduled orders to be done on a daily basis. There are other integrations that are getting used if and when needed.

10) Are you planning to make it compatible with any more apps?

Ya! Surely in the future.

11) Where is the app available? Is it free of cost?

There are 2 apps available on the play store one for orders and for chefs. The app is accessible through Android and also on the web app link Maa Ka Dulaar but for iOS users, the app will be launched soon, and it's totally free of cost. Please register and check out our relishing offerings now!!!

12) What do you do on the marketing front so that people get to know about MKD?

Well the sector which we are in is the food industry and this industry totally works on word of mouth. We always believe if your catering is right then you don't need to do much on the marketing front, as your customer will market your brand at their end.

However, we are fully utilizing the power of social media to expand our reach. We have recently launched a mobile application that will give more flexibility to our customers to book their meal very easily.

Maa ka Dulaar is not limited to India but also reachable to people across the globe. We are getting a lot of requests from different parts of the country to cater to their parents who are staying alone in Bangalore. We feel blessed sometimes to be part of Maa Ka Dulaar.

As well as we are consistently participating in offline events to market ourselves.

For social media presence you can also check our pages listed below:

MaakaDulaar (@maa_ka_dulaar) I Instagram photos and videos

Maa Ka Dulaar | Facebook

13) Any advice to the budding entrepreneurs in the food industry?

There is no better moment than now to start living your goals. If you put in the effort and establish a fair strategy, you can make your vision come true. All you have to do is know what you want and take tiny measures to get there. There will be some failures along the way, but if you learn from them, you'll be even more likely to acquire what you've always desired in the end.