Deliveroo have launched a new service to provide ready-to-eat restaurant food for office workers. Whilst this may spur Amazon to develop an equivalent revenue stream, both would limp way behind India’s 100-Year-Old Lunch Delivery Service.
For instance, every day in Mumbai, some 5,000 deliverymen - called dabba wallahs - hand deliver 200,000 hot meals to doorsteps across the city. It's an intricate network that requires precise timing and numerous hand-offs from courier to courier, there and back.
Apart from split second timing and 100% reliability, and to make sure each lunch pail ends up at the right place, each container has a hieroglyphic-like coding system painted on the lid.
More details here, and some will have seen ‘The Lunchbox’ a popular movie that immortalised the process.
Back in the UK, it remains to be seen how speed of uptake and the emergence of competition (plus a 'higher-tech' coding system that is more than a pale imitation of the Indian method) leads to the development and optimisation of yet another 1:1 route to consumer in food service, at the expense of traditional ‘on & off’ consumption.
