India’s home-cooked food market is quietly booming, driven by urban consumers increasingly seeking familiarity and nutrition in their daily meals. While restaurant aggregators dominate the broader food delivery landscape, a parallel demand for wholesome, home-cooked meals has long remained unmet.
This gap became personal for Praba Santhanakrishnan, a former Microsoft techie, during a hospital stay while recovering from COVID-19. He craved the comfort of home-cooked food and realized there would be millions like him searching for nourishing meals daily.
His later research also revealed a larger supply-demand imbalance. There were also countless talented home chefs, skilled in traditional recipes, “but they lacked the capital, marketing know-how, and logistical support” to reach these hungry consumers.
This insight sparked the idea for Cookr, a Chennai-based food delivery platform that empowers talented home chefs, especially women from middle-income households, to turn their kitchens into thriving businesses. With Cookr, they now had the means to serve food for the urban populace looking for healthy alternatives to restaurant-delivered food.
“Many of our home chefs don’t have college degrees, formal jobs, or even the freedom to step out for work,” Praba explains. “But they have smartphones, and they could cook. We made our platform to bring business to their doorstep and helped convert their cooking skills into a steady income.”
The Growing Demand for Home-Cooked Meals
Praba explains, “If you look at how society is moving forward and the economy is growing, everybody is busy with building their professional career life, and they rarely have time to make these recipes at home,” he says. “Many of them are away from their primary home, and home-cooked meals are hard to access.”
“Restaurant food is fine once in a while, but not regularly,” he says. “Until they are around 28, people eat whatever is available, whether it is junk food or unhealthy meals. The body tolerates it to some extent, but after that, they start looking for healthier alternatives.”
Pilot Project to Test Market Demand and Home Chef Challenges
Praba recalls, “We set up a home kitchen at my sister’s place, and we also interviewed several home chefs to identify key issues that challenge their business.”
He lists the key problems for home chefs:
Delivery: Many home chefs were skilled at cooking but were hesitant to handle food delivery themselves as they were uncomfortable with traveling to customers’ homes or having customers visit their own homes, which limited their ability to scale and serve a wider audience.
Payments: With transactions occurring informally over platforms like WhatsApp, managing payments became complicated as chefs faced challenges tracking who had paid and dealing with missed or forgotten payments.
Packaging: Most home chefs lacked access to professional packaging solutions, which affected the presentation, safety, and freshness of the food.
Marketing: Without formal marketing support, home chefs found it challenging to promote their offerings beyond their immediate networks. Limited visibility hindered their ability to attract new customers and grow their business sustainably.
The Cookr platform took care of the deliveries, packaging, and payments for the home chefs while seamlessly connecting them to their customers across different communities, opening up the door for both the customers and the chefs to explore audiences beyond their immediate surroundings.
“Most of the home chefs we work with are skilled, middle-income women who’ve always wanted to turn their cooking into a livelihood but didn’t have the means to. Many don’t have college degrees or other job options, but what they are an expert at is their cooking. So we built a platform that brings the business to them, through the smartphones they’re already using.”
A Diverse User Base of Urban Residents, Seniors, and Special Needs Groups
Cookr’s user base consists of distinct groups, each with specific needs that go beyond what restaurant food typically offers, with the core audience consisting of urban working individuals from the age group of 20 to 45.
The platform also serves senior citizens, many of whom now live alone with their children settled elsewhere, looking for home-cooked meals
Praba explains, “They need food regularly, and obviously, restaurant or hotel food is not something senior citizens would like to have every day. Consistently getting food the way they like is a challenge for them.”
Praba explains, “There are 75 to 80 million people in the country living with diabetes, and food plays a major role in managing it. We offer options like complex carb-based foods such as millet, low glycemic index rice. These kinds of foods are rarely available at restaurants but are very important for diabetic patients, and I believe this user base is gonna be in higher demand in the future.”
“Let’s say you’re hosting a party and inviting friends over on a Friday evening, maybe 10 to 12 people, and you want to serve healthy, comforting food,” he says. “We can do that. Our chefs cater to party meals as well, based on the choice of menu and style of preparation you prefer.”
The platform earns revenue primarily through a take rate of 20 to 25 percent on each order placed by home chefs. It also charges handling and packaging fees when applicable, along with delivery fees paid by customers. With over 1 million downloads on the Play Store, the platform generates a monthly recurring revenue of ₹1.25 crore and reported ₹17 crores in earnings in the last financial year.
The platform is now expanding its offering with a new service called Nourisho, a category marketplace focused on clean and safe shelf-life food products. The platform will include items like pickles, masala powders, ghee, wood-pressed and cold-pressed oils, honey, and instant breakfast options. These products will be sourced from home producers, verified suppliers, and ethical farmers.
Adding Regional Depth to Everyday Meals Through User Feedback
Cookr initially had a limited number of chefs and recipes, which did not fully meet customer interests. The primary feedback revealed a strong demand for home-style dishes from different regions, leading Cookr to expand its menu variety.
Another key insight was the need for customization. Early versions of the app didn’t support it, but customer requests led Cookr to add options for adjusting dishes to individual tastes. Unlike restaurants that prepare food in bulk and limit customisation, Cookr allows each user to tailor their order.
Praba explains, “Initially, we were not offering any customization. Then customers said, ‘Can you do this level of customization?’ It made sense because we always ask our mothers to make things according to our taste and interest. Customization and personalization are the key things.”
Customer Retention Through Feedback, Accountability
Praba explains, “Early on, the team manually handled issues like missing salt or incorrect spice levels, spoke to customers directly, and passed the feedback to chefs. These steps were later automated, but the approach stayed the same: fix problems, inform the user, and prevent repeat errors. Retention isn’t just about when things go right. It’s about how you handle it when they don’t. This makes the customers stay with us over a long period of time.
To manage consistency, Cookr uses a five-stage SLA (Service Level Agreement) which tracks every order as soon as the order is placed with a dedicated control team monitoring delays, finding alternate routes to delivery when problems arise, and informing customers if their order is running late.
Cookr tracks two key metrics to measure business health and product success: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and Net Promoter Score (NPS). The team tracks Net Promoter Score (NPS) closely, seeing it as a direct measure of customer satisfaction and a predictor of word of mouth expansion.
"NPS score tells us how likely someone is to refer our brand to others. It is on a scale of 1 to 10. Nine and ten are considered favorable, seven and eight are neutral, and anything from one to six is not so favorable. That is actually one of the key measures I track because it shows how well we are really doing in the eyes of our users."
Leveraging AI for Customer Support And Algorithm Matching
“You can use the Cookr app and search for something like calcium-rich food. These kinds of searches aren’t available on Swiggy or Zomato. Earlier, we used to manually tag every item, calcium-rich, iron-rich, and vitamin B12-rich. Now AI does that automatically. You enter the dish name, and it already knows the ingredients and their nutritional value.”
“If I have to anchor on one thing, it’s leveraging AI the right way. Startups shouldn’t reject it or fear it. It improves efficiency, helps you scale faster, and lets you compete with large corporations,” says Praba.
